James Joyce Quotes

248 Sourced Quotes

The end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen path and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him.

James Joyce
I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

James Joyce
His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.

James Joyce
She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

James Joyce
The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

James Joyce
He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

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
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
But there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.

James Joyce
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: — That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! — What? Mr Deasy asked. — A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

James Joyce
He faced about and, standing between the awnings, held out his right arm at arm's length toward the sun. Wanted to try that often. Yes; completely. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun's disc. Must be the focus where the rays cross.

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

James Joyce
The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

James Joyce
One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.

James Joyce
To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

James Joyce
In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.

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

James Joyce
Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing!

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
In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen.

James Joyce
Do you know what Ireland is? Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

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
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
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
For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Filstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined (may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder!) till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor.

James Joyce