James Joyce Quotes

Have read little and understood less.

The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.

Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.

I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.

The end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen path and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.

What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds.

It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.

I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on.

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.

What? Corpus. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupifies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don't seem to chew it; only swallow it down.

The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

There's no police like Holmes.

The only decent people I ever saw at the racecourse were horses.

History is that nightmare from which there is no awakening.

Quotation marks quotato marks! Bah!

You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

(...) You cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.

Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.

I don't want to die. Damn death. Long live life.

Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.

What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.

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.

We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be tell the end of the chapter.... A priest-ridden Godforsaken race.

For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers.

Deal with him, Hemingway!

I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.

This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

There is only one thing that makes any one athlete better than another, his heart. We all put our underwear on feet first, so we are all human.

Signatures of all things I am here to read.

Wipe your glosses with what you know.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: — That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! — What? Mr Deasy asked. — A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

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

Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.

if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.

That ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.

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.

If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails

God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.

He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.

‎I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.

By thinking of things you could understand them.

What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?

The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart.

He laughed to free his mind from his minds bondage.