Quotes from James Joyce

In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

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.

Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant? —I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue...

The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

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.

Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

and yes I said yes I will Yes.

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

We'll meet again, we'll part once more.

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.

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

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.

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

they were yung and easily freudened..

So weenybeenyveenyteeny.

Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!

The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death.

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

I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow

My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.