James Joyce Quotes

248 Sourced Quotes

The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and, as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flourfattened sauce. Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him.

James Joyce
Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are... Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead.

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
I am not likely to die of bashfulness but neither am I prepared to be crucified to attest the perfection of my art. I dislike to hear of any stray heroics on the prowl for me.

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
First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.

James Joyce
What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

James Joyce
ZOE: Come and I'll peel off.
BLOOM: (Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed peddler gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears.) Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew.

James Joyce
We are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.

James Joyce
The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay.

James Joyce
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.

James Joyce
[...] a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

James Joyce
White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea! How simple and beautiful was life after all!

James Joyce
If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

James Joyce
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

James Joyce
If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.

James Joyce
I think people might be willing to pay for the special odor of corruption which, I hope, floats over my stories.

James Joyce
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

James Joyce
The fragrant hair,
Falling as through the silence falleth now
Dusk of the air.

James Joyce
Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.

James Joyce
End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

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
No less than twenty-two publishers and printers read the manuscript of Dubliners and when at last it was printed some very kind person bought out the entire edition and had it burnt in Dublin.

James Joyce
Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.

James Joyce
Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve. That instant was his [Lucifer's] ruin.

James Joyce
We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be tell the end of the chapter.... A priest-ridden Godforsaken race.

James Joyce
In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame.

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
And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history....

James Joyce
An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.

James Joyce