Quotes from James Joyce

Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.

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

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?

God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God.

It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world. Yon marshpond by ruodmark verge is visited by the tide. Alvemmarea! We are circumveiloped by obscuritads. Man and belves frieren.

A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.

There's no friends like the old friends

however, he brought to mind instances of cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the bud of premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves.

His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.

All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it.

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother.

But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

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

His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in revery at leas he had been acquainted with nobility.

Here's lumbos. Where misties swaddlum, where misches lodge none, where mystries pour kind on, O sleepy! So be yet!

But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

There's music along the river For Love wanders there, Pale flowers on his mantle, Dark leaves on his hair.

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On

And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.

Jews are accused of ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it. (...) The priest spells poverty (...) It's in the dogma. Because if they didn't believe they'd go straight to heaven when they die they'd try to live better, at least so I think. (...) I want to see everyone, all creeds and classes having a comfortable tidysized income. I call that patriotism. (526)

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-

I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on.

obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days.

Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.