James Joyce Quotes

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

In the particular is contained the universal.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.

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?

But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.

Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!

What is better than to sit at the end of the day and drink wine with friends, or substitutes for friends?

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

When I die Dublin will be written on my heart.

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

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.

Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and a bottle.

My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.

[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description

A woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out.

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.

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

Every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.

When a man is born...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.

Nations have their ego, just like individuals.

White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.

The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. NON SERVIAM!

His heart danced upon her movement like a cork upon a tide.

Shaw's works make me admire the magnificent tolerance and broadmindedness of the english.

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

Let my country die for me.

To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatesoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.

Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.

We are bound together by the sympathy of our antipathies.

And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me. And so was his father.

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.

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.

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

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.

One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.

An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.