“There's many a true word spoken in jest.”
Source: The Little Review
“Winds of May, that dance on the sea,
Dancing a ring-around in glee
From furrow to furrow, while overhead
The foam flies up to be garlanded,
In silvery arches spanning the air,
Saw you my true love anywhere?
Welladay! Welladay!
For the winds of May!
Love is unhappy when love is away!”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
“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: 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 came in at half past eleven. Since then I have been sitting in an easy chair like a fool. I could do nothing. I hear nothing but your voice. I am like a fool hearing you call me 'Dear.' I offended two men today by leaving them coolly. I wanted to hear your voice, not theirs. When I am with you I leave aside my contemptuous, suspicious nature. I wish I felt your head on my shoulder.”
Source: Selected letters of James Joyce
“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
“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life”
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“Sentimentality is unearned emotion.”
“All human history moves towards one great goal”
Source: Ulysses
“Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.”
Source: JAMES JOYCE Premium Collection: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Chamber Music & Exiles
“The only decent people I ever saw at the racecourse were horses.”
“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.”
Source: James Joyce The Dover Reader
“The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.”
“Absence, the highest form of presence.”
Source: The dead
“Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.”
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 see the regions of snow and ice, I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn, I see the seal-seeker in his boat poising his lance, I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge drawn by dogs, I see the porpoise-hunters, I see the whale-crews of the south Pacific and the north Atlantic, I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys of Switzerland - I mark the long winters and the isolation.”
“Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.”
Source: Ulysses
“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.”
Source: Ulysses
“All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.”
“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”
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
“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.”
“O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
“The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously”
“When I die Dublin will be written on my heart.”
“What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?”
Source: James Joyce: The Complete Novels (Book House)
“His heart danced upon her movement like a cork upon a tide.”
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.”
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
“Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more. She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she?”
Source: James Joyce The Dover Reader
“What birds were they? (...) He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice be- hind the wainscot : a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.”
Source: James Joyce: The Poems in Verse and Prose
“My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial”
“Signatures of all things I am here to read.”
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
“Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.”
Source: ULYSSES (Modern Classics Series)
“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.”
Source: Dubliners
“Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)
“When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the "Agamemnon."”
“I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.”
“Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand: and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.”
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“Places remember events.”
Source: Joyce's Ulysses notesheets in the British Museum
“Always see a fellows weak point in his wife.”
Source: Ulysses
“Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.”
Source: James Joyce The Dover Reader
“Heart of my heart, were it more,
More would be laid at your feet.”
Source: James Joyce: The Complete Novels (Book House)
“An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.”
“You cannot eat your cake and have it.”
Source: Ulysses
