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Joyce Quotes

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Joyce Quotes

“Joyce acquits Blake peremptorily of the charges of insanity and vague mysticism: For the first, 'To say that a great genius is mad, is no better than to say he is a rheumatic or diabetic.' For the second, he was a mystic only insofar as he could be one and remain an artist; his mysticism was no swooning ecstasy like that of St. John of the Cross, but a western mysticism filled with an 'innate sense of form and the coordinating power of the intellect.”

“The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [...] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do...you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics.”

“Ibrahim presses play, and they all watch as the figure in the motorcycle helmet walks down the row of lockers and stops in front of 531. The figure inserts a key. 'Looks like he's having trouble with the lock too,' says Joyce. 'Or she,' says Ron. Ibrahim notes that Ron is getting much sharper on his gender neutrality.”

“En el mundo hay gente que lee y gente que no lee. En el mundo hay gente que puede con todo y jamás abandona una lectura y hay gente que deja de leer un texto porque no le dice nada. Yo soy de los lectores que pertenecen a esta clase. Hoy he dejado de leer un libro de Pamuk, “El libro negro”. Me cuesta renunciar a la lectura, me parece un desprecio a la literatura. Me pasó con el “Ulises” de Joyce y casi me pasa lo mismo con “El jinete polaco” de Muñoz Molina. Meses después logré leerla y me emocionó la escena del encuentro, o más bien, reencuentro del hijo y el padre en una estación de trenes. Antonio Muñoz Molina alarga exageradamente las líneas. No es fácil. Con otro libro extraño de un autor extraño- Juan Rulfo- me veía incapaz de acabarlo. Más adelante pude con la novela gracias a unas líneas referentes a la grandeza de “Pedro Páramo” puestas en boca de la Reina del Sur* Soy un lector que no lee todos los libros. Me pregunto si sería bueno anotar en un diario de lecturas como goodreads además de los libros leídos-mis pequeños desafíos- registrar igualmente los libros no leídos. Hoy he dejado de leer “El libro negro” y lo siento. Detrás de muchas batallas ganadas se guardan muchas derrotas. Esta es mi cuenta en mi diario de lecturas goodreads Una novela de Vargas Llosa me espera, me está esperando inquieta … _”

“Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be. Northmen's thing made southfolk's place but howmulty plurators made eachone in per-son? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daugh-ters of. Whawk? Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flitter-ing bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can't hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffey-ing waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won't moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughter- sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who wereShem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!”

“No cabe duda de que el contraataque más exuberante lanzado por escritor alguno contra la reducción del lenguaje es el de James Joyce. Después de Shakespeare y de Burton, la literatura no había conocido semejante goloso de las palabras. Como si se hubiera dado cuenta de que la ciecnia había arrebatado al lenguaje muchas de sus antiguas posesiones, de sus colonias periféricas, Joyce quiso anexionarle una nuevo reino subterráneo. El Ulises pesca en su red luminosa la confusión viva de la vida inconsciente; Finnegan´s Wake destruye los bastiones del sueño, Joyce, como nadie había después de Milton, devuelve al oído inglés la vasta magnificiencia de su ancestro. Comanda grandes batallones de palabras, recluta nuevas palabras hace tiempo olvidadas u oxidadas, llama a filas otras palabras nuevas convocadas por las necesidades de la imaginación.”

“That's total mech waste. I'm glad I trusted my gut and didn't hand this thing over to the Order. I'm glad I sat with this commonplace for so many units. I'm not sure if I've ever believed in the transmogrification. I'm not too sure if I cared very much about this book at all. But I think if I had handed this book over to the Order, Mr. Smalls and his cronies would have burned this book. Even if I am not sure about the transmogrification of the data I can see now so many units later so much of Pop and Mabel’s cryptz in here. I think it's true what they say about youth thinking they’ve got it all figured out. I'm glad I attempted as hard as I could to stave off rigidity. So many of my fellow etceterists found their little box, climbed inside, had the box taped shut from the outside with the help of peer reinforcement, taped it from the inside too, parceled themselves off, and lost themselves in the realm of the archival sublime.”

“Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland.”

“In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.”

“I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as he explained to me, the meaning in Finnegans Wake is obscure because it is a 'nightpiece.' I think, too, that, like the author's sight, the work is often blurred.”

“Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography.”

“Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind when he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.”

“When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.”

“A part of what makes myths live is their multiplicity, the way different voices retell them in every generation. Homer survives because his poetry was outstanding, yes, but also because he's been passed down by so many by luminaries like Vergil and Ovid, Shakespeare, James Joyce and Margaret Atwood, but also by countless others. I wanted to do my part for these tremendous stories.”

“What other developed democracy has such a ridiculous and squalid history of intolerance? From the imprisonment and roasting of heretics, witches and poachers, to the censorship of literature, art and television: from St Alban through Wilde, Joyce and Lawrence I think we can point with pride to as grim a catalogue of intemperate, bigoted repression as any nation on earth.”

“James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world.”

“Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.”

“To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.”