Joyce James Quotes

#1. Chuck Norris doesn't need to understand the work of James Joyce; James Joyce needs to understand the work of Chuck Norris.

Brian Celio

#2. [James] Joyce ... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized ...

Tom Stoppard

#3. Tenors get women by the score.

James Joyce

#4. 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.

James Joyce

#5. James Joyce once called Guinness stout "the wine of Ireland." Indeed it's one of the most successful beers worldwide. Ten million glasses of this ambrosial liquid are consumed with great gusto each day.

Rashers Tierney

#6. The world is before you

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#8. Ena milo melomon, frai is frau and swee is too, swee is two when swoo is free, ana mala woe is we!

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#10. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.

James Joyce

#11. You don't know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put money in thy purse.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#14. My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

James Joyce

#15. James Joyce seemed like the most arrogant man who ever lived, had both his eyes wide open and great faculty of speech, but what he say, I knew not what.

Bob Dylan

#16. Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.

James Joyce

#17. First we feel. Then we fall.

James Joyce

#18. 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

#19. Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#21. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.

James Joyce

#22. She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness.

James Joyce

#23. His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull.Flames burst forth from his skull like a corolla,shrieking like voices: -Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!

James Joyce

#24. Love ... is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself

James Joyce

#25. That is god ... A shout in the street,' Stephen answered ...

James Joyce

#26. He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points.

James Joyce

#27. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me.

James Joyce

#28. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.

James Joyce

#29. I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

James Joyce

#30. Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

James Joyce

#31. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones.

James Joyce

#32. I'm drawn to women who live in a world different from my own. I don't believe you have to marry someone from your own backyard. James Joyce married a woman who never read any of his books.

Matt Dillon

#33. 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

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

James Joyce

#35. It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.

James Joyce

#36. Try imagining James Joyce not writing about being a Catholic.

Victor LaValle

#37. Every morning, therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before he had greased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on his tall hat.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#39. The trees do not resent autumn nor
does any exemplary thing in nature resent its limitations.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#41. The words I speak to these chairs
must be silencing.
It has stunned them
into a profound emptiness.
No creaking from the gallery
no James Joyce here, nor Malory
An unknown author
in a very large chain
can't you hear me rattling?

B.J. Ward

#42. The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

James Joyce

#43. The shortest way to Tara is via Holyhead

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#45. My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial

James Joyce

#46. And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

James Joyce

#47. He is gone from mortal haunts: O'Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the shaggy brow. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.

James Joyce

#48. Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

James Joyce

#49. There's no police like Holmes.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

#52. - Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

James Joyce

#53. I think of you so often you have no idea.

James Joyce

#54. 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

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

James Joyce

#56. It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture.

James Joyce

#57. You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

James Joyce

#58. Let my country die for me.

James Joyce

#59. I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due installments plans. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak a different vernacular, so to speak.

James Joyce

#60. 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

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

James Joyce

#62. 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

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

James Joyce

#64. Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.

James Joyce

#65. And you'll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, till whensday.

James Joyce

#66. A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

James Joyce

#67. Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can't understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn't he have some spark of manhood about him?

James Joyce

#68. Their tunics bloodbright in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped polls.

James Joyce

#69. The leaning of sophists toward the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant quantity. The highroads are dreary but they lead to the town.

James Joyce

#70. 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

#71. Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no other word tender enough to be your name?

James Joyce

#72. Never back a woman you defend, never get quit of a friend on whom you depend, never make face to a foe till he's rife and never get stuck to another man's pfife.

James Joyce

#73. 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.

James Joyce

#74. When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart.

James Joyce

#75. - I mean, said Stephen, that I was not myself as I am now, as I had to become.

James Joyce

#76. Yes, it was her he was looking at, and there was meaning in his look. His eyes burned into her as though they would search her through and through, read her very soul.

James Joyce

#77. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

James Joyce

#79. They lived and laughed and loved and left.

James Joyce

#80. Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides,

James Joyce

#81. They listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine.

James Joyce

#82. James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

Samuel Beckett

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

James Joyce

#84. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

James Joyce

#85. If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.

James Joyce

#86. The mockery of it! he said gaily

James Joyce

#87. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody's body.

James Joyce

#88. -I bar the candles, ... I bar the magic-lantern
business.

James Joyce

#89. Reefer was a wenchman.

James Joyce

#90. You have to think bigger than what you know, James

Rachel Joyce

#91. ..they were yung and easily freudened..

James Joyce

#92. Well, Tommy, he said, I wish you and yours every joy in life, old chap, and tons of money, and may you never die till I shoot you. And that's the wish of a sincere friend, an old friend. You know that?

James Joyce

#93. Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

James Joyce

#94. All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.

James Joyce

#95. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: "O love! O love!" many times.

James Joyce

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

Virginia Woolf

#97. (...) and, as a matter of fict, by my halfwife, (...)

James Joyce

#98. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

James Joyce

#99. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.

James Joyce

#100. 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.

James Joyce