James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)

69 Sourced Quotes

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Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

James Joyce

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

James Joyce

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

James Joyce

I don't mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father's house?
MTo seek misfortune, was Stephen's answer.

James Joyce

Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with breadcrumbs, fried hencod's roe. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of scented urine.

James Joyce

O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me youve no chances at all inthis place like you used long ago I wish somebody would write me a loveletter....

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

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

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

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

Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas, then solid, then world, then cold, then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock like that pineapple rock. The moon.

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

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?

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

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.

James Joyce

I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.

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

The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

James Joyce

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

James Joyce

(...) The new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Specch, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.

James Joyce

Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.

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

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

James Joyce

Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail.

James Joyce

We were always loyal to lost causes...Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. ~ Professor MacHugh

James Joyce

And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

James Joyce

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

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

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

James Joyce