James Joyce Quotes

248 Sourced Quotes

Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail.

James Joyce
He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

James Joyce
I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Near-wicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come.

James Joyce
We were always loyal to lost causes...Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. ~ Professor MacHugh

James Joyce
And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

James Joyce
I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

James Joyce
Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

James Joyce
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

James Joyce
Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.

James Joyce
People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.

James Joyce
But oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

James Joyce
By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care (saving them for later use, that is), seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

James Joyce
The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. NON SERVIAM!

James Joyce
Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

James Joyce
When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…

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
I laugh at it today, now that I have had all the good of it. Let the bridge blow up, provided I have got my troops across... Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.

James Joyce
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

James Joyce
(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle.

James Joyce
Can you nei do her, numb? asks Dolph, suspecting the answer know. Oikkont, ken you, ninny? asks Kev, expecting the answer guess.

James Joyce
A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place, Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword? A Successful Career in the Civil Service.

James Joyce
Frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines

James Joyce
Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.

James Joyce
In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

James Joyce
You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

James Joyce
Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with breadcrumbs, fried hencod's roe. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of scented urine.

James Joyce
His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

James Joyce
The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.

James Joyce
He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim!

James Joyce
Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled:
— It has not epiphanised yet, he said.

James Joyce