Top 100 Quotes About Ulysses
#1. People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.
Dale Peck
#2. [Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Virginia Woolf
#3. He's meant to be that classic Homer, Ulysses, Hercules - a character who goes out or has some gift of some kind. He goes on a journey of discovery and part of that is falling into darkness - the temptations of life.
Robert Redford
#4. Ulysses'. No one reads him anymore. No one reads anything anymore. They think Browning is a gun.
Richard Flanagan
#5. 'Ulysses' is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic.
Tom Paulin
#6. The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.
James Lee Burke
#7. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out in my mind as the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves. Marguerite Young has added epic grandeur to the philosophical novel. Every page gleams with the poetry of existence.
Nona Balakian
#8. 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
#9. We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
"Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. It was then Raiden Ulysses Miller scorched me a second time, but I didn't battle this blaze. There was no pain. But that didn't mean I didn't end up branded.
Kristen Ashley
#13. When Ulysses saw his brother, a wonderful thing happened to his face. All the terror left his eyes, because now he was hom
William, Saroyan
#14. The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anabasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly's Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I
Pierce Brown
#15. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that, whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.
John Munro Woolsey
#16. Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.
E. M. Forster
#17. The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
[on James Joyce's Ulysses]
Virginia Woolf
#19. The words were good words, Ulysses felt, maybe even great words, but the list was very incomplete. He was just getting started. The words needed to be arranged, fussed with, put in the order of his heart.
Kate DiCamillo
#20. Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?
Robert A. Heinlein
#21. Abraham Lincoln went through 12 generals before he got Ulysses S. Grant. He had never done a Civil War before.
Marianne Williamson
#22. I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce.
Frederick Lenz
#23. I still think reading something like 'Ulysses' takes a tremendous investment of time, but it repays all of it with so much interest.
D. B. Weiss
#24. Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I'll write Ulysses."
Philip Pullman
#25. During the Civil War, on hearing complaints that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant drank alcohol to excess Find out what Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to each of my other generals!
Abraham Lincoln
#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. And Ulysses stopped his ears against the siren's song for it was death.
V.E Schwab
#28. If I can leave a single message with the younger generation, it is to lash yourself to the mast, like Ulysses if you must, to escape the siren calls of complacency and indifference.
Edward Kennedy
#29. Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'
Salman Rushdie
#30. There is nothing like lying flat on your back on the deck, alone except for the helmsman aft at the wheel, silence except for the lapping of the sea against the side of the ship. At that time you can be equal to Ulysses and brother to him.
Errol Flynn
#31. Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.
Roddy Doyle
#32. Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, or has won the Golden Fleece, and then returns, experienced and knowledgeable, to spend the rest of his life among his family.
Joachim Du Bellay
#33. What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
David Baker
#34. Ulysses, darling," she whispered, "you don't mind that I'm a round-heeled tart."
"Nonsense. You're my cherry tart. Ripe and oh-so sweet, you naughty girl."
-Angelia Sparrow, Cherry Tart
Naomi Brooks
#35. Twenty-six letters: Marjorie Morningstar or Ulysses.
The man-made world means exactly that. There isn't an inch of it that doesn't have to be dealt with, figured out, executed. And it's waiting for you to decide what it's going to look like.
Chip Kidd
#36. You say that like she edited Ulysses," I said. "I don't care!" said my friend. "It was a No. 1 best-seller!" VII.
Keith Gessen
#37. They even say that an altar dedicated to Ulysses , with the addition of the name of his father, Laertes , was formerly discovered on the same spot, and that certain monuments and tombs with Greek inscriptions, still exist on the borders of Germany and Rhaetia .
Tacitus
#38. Ulysses Club (Australia) a social club for riders over 40, whose membership is dedicated to "growing old disgracefully", or
Stella Rheingold
#39. A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel.
Rebecca West
#40. 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
#41. I read the book [My Life by Bill Clinton] completely. And I think it compares very favorably with Ulysses S. Grant's gold standard of presidential autobiographies.
Dan Rather
#42. They couldn't him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Dreirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was miracle ingredient Z-247.
Joseph Heller
#43. 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
#44. I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.
Jorge Luis Borges
#45. If you think of all the enduring stories in the world, they're of journeys. Whether it's 'Don Quixote' or 'Ulysses,' there's always this sense of a quest - of a person going away to be tested, and coming back.
Robyn Davidson
#46. This is the most beautiful thing we'll ever have to publish. Let us print it if it's the last effort of our lives!
-on publishing Ulysses
Margaret Anderson
#47. Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?'
Elizabeth Gilbert
#48. 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
#49. My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.
James Patterson
#50. On the whole, I don't like reading long books. I'm not a fan of 'Ulysses.' And I haven't quite finished 'War and Peace.'
Vikram Seth
#51. You can't just fly into the Great Coat, shoot your way into Bluewater, and take Kai and his father,' I told him.
'Why not?'
'Cause you can't. They'll killl you, for one thing.'
Ulysses scratched his beard. 'Hmm. Need a better plan.
Cameron Stracher
#52. I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S Grant in full military regalia.
Mark Twain
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. He read and reread 'Ulysses'. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.
Richard Flanagan
#56. And Ulysses stopped up his ears against the siren's song," recited Victor, pulling the plugs from his own ears as Serena collapsed to the dirt lot, "for it was death.
V.E Schwab
#57. Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent,
Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love
Soren Kierkegaard
#58. A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance - And the myths that actually touched you at that time - not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas - but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman.
Tom Wolfe
#59. We can even see the legal institution of marriage as a precommitment strategy, not unlike that of Ulysses in approaching the Sirens, in which people knowingly choose a legal status that will protect them against their own errors.
Richard H. Thaler
#60. I used to carry a copy of Ulysses with me everywhere just in case I was knocked down by a bus. It seemed more important than having clean underwear.
Craig Raine
#61. Of this trinity of classic heroes - Ulysses, Aeneas, and Achilles - Ulysses is the least obnoxious.
William A. Quayle
#62. After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.
Raymond Queneau
#63. I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which 'The Recognitions' ' debt to 'Ulysses' was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read 'Ulysses.
William Gaddis
#64. 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
#65. Education of youth is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher; but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave to Ulysses.
John Milton
#66. To take so much punctuation in one hit initially sounds audacious, but perhaps the thief thought no one would notice as most readers never get that far into Ulysses - you will recall the theft of chapter sixty-two from Moby-Dick, where no one noticed?
Jasper Fforde
#68. The head coach don't want no sissies, so he reads to us from something called Ulysses.
Allan Sherman
#69. I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.
George Orwell
#70. When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
Raymond Queneau
#71. 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
#72. Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.
Raymond Queneau
#73. No, it did a lot of other things, too.
[turning down fan who asked to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses
James Joyce
#74. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all rode their wartime heroics into the White House.
Jeff Greenfield
#75. You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
William Faulkner
#76. When the clocks of midnight squander a generous time, I will go further than Ulysses' oarsmen to the realm of dreams, inaccessible to human nature. From that underwater region, I rescue fragments that I do not begin to understand.
Jorge Luis Borges
#77. HE WILL BECOME KNOWN TO THE WORLD AS ULYSSES! Holy
Kate DiCamillo
#78. We haven't time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know-when every day we're running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew.
Seneca The Younger
#79. All suburban housing developments look alike, and besides, every Yankee who ever crossed the Potomac except Ulysses S. Grant got lost as soon as he reached the Virginia side.
Charles McCarry
#80. Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?
Abraham Cowley
#81. Originally, when I wrote the song 'The Sensual World' I had used text from the end of 'Ulysses.' When I asked for permission to use the text, I was refused, which was disappointing.
Kate Bush
#82. Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.
William, Saroyan
#83. Will I die without ever reading Ulysses to the end?
David Mitchell
#84. Being a nerd, which is to say going to far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant.
Sarah Vowell
#85. The sax solo as we know it today would not exist without Gerry Rafferty. His 1978 soft-rock classic 'Baker Street' has to be the 'Ulysses' of rock & roll saxophone, giving the entire chorus over to Raphael Ravenscroft's sax solo, creating one of the Seventies' most enduringly creepy sounds.
Rob Sheffield
#86. The title is Ulysses'
'Is it about the Odyssey?'
'No, it's about how prosaic life is today.'
'And so?'
'That's all. It says that our heads are full of nonsense. That we are flesh, blood, and bone. That one person has the same value as another. That we want only to eat, drink, fuck.
Elena Ferrante
#87. I'm willing to keep an open mind about the existence of God or whether or not Joye's Ulysses is a great novel, but I have no doubt that one way or another child molesters are nurtured, not born.
Rafael Yglesias
#88. Delectable," Ulysses said. "Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best.
Clifford D. Simak
#90. Ulysses was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.
Orson Scott Card
#91. Constant Penelope sends to thee, careless Ulysses.
Write not again, but come, sweet mate
Ovid
#92. We must be careful what we read, and not, like the sailors of Ulysses, take bags of wind for sacks of treasure.
John Lubbock
#93. One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa
blessing it rather than in love with it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#94. Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature.
Sara Sheridan
#95. There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots. And I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter and, I trust, the stronger party.
Ulysses S. Grant
#98. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.
Ulysses S. Grant
#99. I desire the good-will of all, whether hitherto my friends or not.
Ulysses S. Grant
#100. The most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticized.
Ulysses S. Grant
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