James Joyce Quotes

248 Sourced Quotes

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

James Joyce
Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.

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
As a physicist he had learned that of the 70 years of complete human life at least 2/7, viz. 20 years are passed in sleep.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand: and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

James Joyce
What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

James Joyce
He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington but in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.

James Joyce
I am damnably sick of Italy, Italian and Italians, outrageously, illogically sick.... I hate to think that Italians ever did anything in the way of art.... What did they do but illustrate a page or so of the New Testament! They themselves think they have a monopoly in the line. I am dead tired of their bello and bellezza.

James Joyce
Human society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap. The realm of literature is the realm of these accidental manners and humours--a spacious realm; and the true literary artist concerns himself mainly with them.

James Joyce
It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.

James Joyce
Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more. She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she?

James Joyce
O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?

James Joyce
Be a warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black conducts, reflects (refracts is it?) the heat.

James Joyce
The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

James Joyce
I am working out a quantum theory about it for it is really most tantalizing state of affairs.

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
Of the parallax or parallactic drift of so called fixed stars, in reality ever moving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years threescore and ten, of allotted life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

James Joyce