James Joyce Ulysses Quotes

#1. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text.

Philip Pullman

#2. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all ... he is a complete man as well, a good man.

James Joyce

#3. I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact.

James Joyce

#4. ( ... ) 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

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

James Joyce

#6. 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.

James Joyce

#7. 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

#8. Be just before you are generous.

James Joyce

#9. To pass the time, I made valiant strides in my effort to read Ulysses, but feared I was losing the war. A hundred pages in, I was getting the sneaking suspicion that James Joyce might have been an asshole, and by Nebraska I was in a foul mood.

B. Justin Shier

#10. 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.

James Joyce

#11. Stephen picks up on Armstrong's pier, and calls Kingstown pier "a disappointed bridge" (2.22). He's joking about the fact that Ireland wanted to be connected to continental Europe but ended up being extremely isolated.

James Joyce

#12. The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue...

James Joyce

#13. I'm not sure which I dislike more: 'Ulysses' or the James Joyce estate. Admittedly, a few people have got some pleasure from 'Ulysses', but against that, you have to weigh the millions of lives that have been ruined by the futile attempts to read it.

Kevin Myers

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

James Joyce

#15. Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#17. I am, a stride at a time

James Joyce

#18. Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

James Joyce

#19. The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.

James Joyce

#20. James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

Werner Herzog

#21. He laughed to free his mind from his minds bondage.

James Joyce

#22. Shite and onions!

James Joyce

#23. Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?
He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him should by him not be told.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#25. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic.

James Joyce

#26. Forget physics, forget organic chem, forget reading James Joyce's Ulysses - organizing your time is one of the biggest challenges you'll face in your academic career.

Stefanie Weisman

#27. I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce.

Frederick Lenz

#28. 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

#29. A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.

Declan Kiberd

#30. James Joyce's Ulysses

Pamela Paul

#31. The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
[on James Joyce's Ulysses]

Virginia Woolf

#32. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already. Yet sometimes they repent too late.
Ulysses

James Joyce

#33. 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.

Frederick Lenz