James Joyce - Life Quotes

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To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer, and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples.

James Joyce
The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.

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

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

James Joyce
It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...

James Joyce
Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

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
Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

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

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
I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.

James Joyce
He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched upon him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.

James Joyce
But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus.

James Joyce
A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he knew it was in God's power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy.

James Joyce
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

James Joyce
Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory.

James Joyce
Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

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
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!

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

James Joyce
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

James Joyce