James Joyce Quotes

248 Sourced Quotes

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

James Joyce
You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

James Joyce
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

James Joyce
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

James Joyce
A nation is the same people living in the same place.

James Joyce
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

James Joyce
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.

James Joyce
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

James Joyce
Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

James Joyce
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

James Joyce
In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

James Joyce
Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time.

James Joyce
In the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world

James Joyce
If it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.

James Joyce
My patience are exhausted [Martha Clifford].

James Joyce
Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way.

James Joyce
Every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.

James Joyce
Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.

James Joyce
What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

James Joyce
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

James Joyce
When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

James Joyce
He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.

James Joyce
While you have a thing it can be taken from you... but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

James Joyce
When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.

James Joyce
If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.

James Joyce