James Joyce Quotes

248 Sourced Quotes

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce
I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description

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

James Joyce
Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn't got much of a bark And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.

James Joyce
I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

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
Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

James Joyce
What did it avail to pray when he knew his soul lusted after its own destruction?

James Joyce
Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.

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

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

James Joyce
(...) You cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.

James Joyce
White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of.

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
By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

James Joyce
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

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
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
A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.

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