James Joyce Quotes

#1. Going to a dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

James Joyce

#2. Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

James Joyce

#3. But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age; and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day..

James Joyce

#4. This is the way to the museyroom. Mind your boots goan out.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#6. There's no police like Holmes.

James Joyce

#7. You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#9. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed him.

James Joyce

#10. YesIsaidyesyesyesyesyes...YesIsaidyes! andagainyesyesyes -- Molly Bloom

James Joyce

#11. The mockery of it! he said gaily

James Joyce

#12. Groangrousegurgling Toft's cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room right roundabout the room.)

James Joyce

#13. It was hard work-a hard life-but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

James Joyce

#14. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains.

James Joyce

#15. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

James Joyce

#16. Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

James Joyce

#17. And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

James Joyce

#18. All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

James Joyce

#19. - I'm a believer in universal brotherhood, said Temple, glancing about him out of his dark oval eyes. Marx is only a bloody cod.

James Joyce

#20. Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all.

James Joyce

#21. Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.

James Joyce

#22. Life is the great teacher.

James Joyce

#23. To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic.

James Joyce

#24. Broken Eggs will poursuive bitten Apples for where theirs is Will there's his Wall

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#26. And, as a mere matter of ficfect, I tell of myself how I popo possess the ripest littlums wifukie around the globelettes globes (...)

James Joyce

#27. Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

James Joyce

#28. She would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#30. Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

James Joyce

#31. Love between man and woman is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse, and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.

James Joyce

#32. Knock knock. War's where! Which war? The Twwinns. Knock knock. Woos without! Without what? An apple. Knock knock.

James Joyce

#33. And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

James Joyce

#34. Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We'll meet again, we'll part once more. The spot I'll seek if the hour you'll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk's upset.

James Joyce

#35. Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

James Joyce

#36. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

James Joyce

#37. Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.
-Stephen Dedalus-

James Joyce

#38. As you are now so once were we.

James Joyce

#39. Even if we are often led to desire through the sense of beauty can you say that the beautiful is what we desire?

James Joyce

#40. He used to call her Poppens out of fun.

James Joyce

#41. Hump for humbleness, dump for dirts.

James Joyce

#42. No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.

James Joyce

#43. I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.

James Joyce

#44. But I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?

James Joyce

#45. The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare's hoofs clattering along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and rattling behind him.

James Joyce

#46. King Solomon says in Proverbs that there is nothing new under the sun.

James Joyce

#47. The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

James Joyce

#48. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

James Joyce

#49. My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity - home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines

James Joyce

#50. If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door.

James Joyce

#51. All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it.

James Joyce

#52. The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life
the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense
the life of Blake or of Dante
taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.

James Joyce

#53. He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did not answer the glances which invited him to be bold.

James Joyce

#54. A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

James Joyce

#55. ...and yes I said yes I will Yes.

James Joyce

#56. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

James Joyce

#57. ( ... ) 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.

James Joyce

#58. Too excited to be genuinely happy

James Joyce

#59. So beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf

James Joyce

#60. Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.

James Joyce

#61. The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton
Parnell
never a man.

James Joyce

#62. Know all men, he said, time's ruins build eternity's mansions.

James Joyce

#63. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me.

James Joyce

#64. 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.

James Joyce

#65. If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?

James Joyce

#66. Ay say aye. I affirmly swear to it that it rooly and cooly boolyhooly was with my holyhagionous lips continuously poised upon the rubricated annuals of saint ulstar.

James Joyce

#67. They mouth love's language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Love's breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
As sour as cat's breath,
Harsh of tongue.

James Joyce

#68. I'll tickle his catastrophe.

James Joyce

#69. His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

James Joyce

#70. Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

James Joyce

#71. 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.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#73. Life is too short to read bad books.

James Joyce

#74. A dream of favours, a favourable dream. They know how they believe that they believe that they know. Wherefore they wail.

James Joyce

#75. round hat, set upon it sideways, looked

James Joyce

#76. If it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.

James Joyce

#77. - Is the brother with you, Malachi? - Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons. - Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her. - Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.

James Joyce

#78. No, it did a lot of other things, too.
[turning down fan who asked to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses

James Joyce

#79. The music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of children.

James Joyce

#80. The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended.

James Joyce

#81. Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye!

James Joyce

#82. We must go to Athens.

James Joyce

#83. Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.

James Joyce

#84. Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude ...

James Joyce

#85. Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut!

James Joyce

#86. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.

James Joyce

#87. Love loves to love love.

James Joyce

#88. He said it was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea ...

James Joyce

#89. I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.

James Joyce

#90. Kyrie ! The radiance of the intellect. I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind.

James Joyce

#91. So he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.

James Joyce

#92. Agenbite of Inwit

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#94. Redheaded women buck like goats.

James Joyce

#95. School and home seem to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.

James Joyce

#96. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free sex and a free lay church in a free lay state.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#98. I am proud to be an emotionalist.

James Joyce

#99. 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.

James Joyce

#100. History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.

James Joyce