James Joyce Quotes

248 Sourced Quotes

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.

James Joyce
I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.

James Joyce
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

James Joyce
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

James Joyce
The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

James Joyce
I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

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
This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

James Joyce
A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

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

James Joyce
O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me youve no chances at all inthis place like you used long ago I wish somebody would write me a loveletter....

James Joyce
The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and 're-embody' it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.

James Joyce
I don't mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father's house?
MTo seek misfortune, was Stephen's answer.

James Joyce
O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.

James Joyce
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat, than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also.

James Joyce
Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.

James Joyce