James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

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

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
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

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

James Joyce
I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

James Joyce
He was alone and young and wilful and wild-hearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures, of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.

James Joyce
What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

James Joyce
If it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.

James Joyce
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
He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

James Joyce
It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.

James Joyce
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

James Joyce
The only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

James Joyce
His mind, emptied of theory and courage, lapsed back into a listless peace.

James Joyce
When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

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

James Joyce
In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.

James Joyce
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

James Joyce
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

James Joyce
Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

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

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