“(...) 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.”
Source: Delphi Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
“To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.”
Source: The Best of James Joyce
“Let my country die for me.”
Source: James Joyce: The Complete Novels (Book House)
“What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.”
Source: Four Novels by James Joyce
“People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
“Life is too short to read a bad book.”
“Deal with him, Hemingway!”
“You ask me why I don’t love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire to possess a person wholly, to admire and honour that person deeply, and to seek to secure that person’s happiness in every way is to “love” then perhaps my affection for you is a kind of love. I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence.”
Source: Selected letters of James Joyce
“I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”
Source: The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more
“I'd love to have the whole place swimming in roses”
Source: Ulysses,
“He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.”
Source: DUBLINERS (Modern Classics Series): The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby, Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House, A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, Mother, Grace & The Dead
“Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration.”
Source: Dubliners
“Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman.”
“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.”
Source: DUBLINERS (Modern Classics Series): The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby, Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House, A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, Mother, Grace & The Dead
“I am proud to be an emotionalist.”
“Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! 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. On and on and on and on!”
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.”
Source: The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more
“Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.”
Source: Ulysses
“I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
“Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.”
Source: Ulysses
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”
“A man's errors are his portals of discovery.”
“Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.”
Source: Ulysses
“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?”
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Thrift Study Edition
“Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foaming ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.”
Source: The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more
“When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.”
“A nation is the same people living in the same place.”
Source: The Little Review
“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
“Masturbation! The amazing availability of it!”
“Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
“White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.”
“...rapid motion through space elates one.”
Source: The Best of James Joyce
“Does nobody understand?”
Source: The Dead (Annotated)
“By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care (saving them for later use, that is), seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”
“Ulysses He ... saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid flatong flower.”
“I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. You can see for yourself how many different ways they might be arranged.”
“I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.”
Source: Selected letters of James Joyce
“Some people believe that we go on living in another body after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or on some other planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past lives.”
Source: Ulysses
“The studious silence of the library ... Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness.”
“He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?”
Source: The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more
“Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.”
Source: The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more
“When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.”
Source: Critical Writings
“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”
Source: Stephen Hero & A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Two Autobiographical Novels): Including Biography of the Author
“Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk”
“There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.”
“Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.”
“There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. I wake early, often at 5 o'clock, and start writing at once.”
“The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue.”
Source: Four Novels by James Joyce
“The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric.”
“White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea! How simple and beautiful was life after all!”
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Thrift Study Edition
