Quotes from James Joyce

God! ... Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton . Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.

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.

Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.... Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.

Phall if you but will, rise you must.

If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus.

the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry.

He went up to his room after dinner in order to be alone with his soul: and at every step his soul seemed to sigh: at every step his soul mounted with his feet, sighing in the ascent, through a region of viscid gloom.

What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained...

His head was large, globular and oily; it sweated in all weathers; and his large round hat, set upon it sideways, looked like a bulb which had grown out of another.

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork on the tide.

Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed...

Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.

I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse.

Time was to sin and to enjoy, time was to scoff at God and at the warnings of His holy church, time was to defy His majesty, to disobey His commands, to hoodwink one's fellow men, to commit sin after sin and to hide one's corruption from the sight of men.

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.

He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life's feast.

i know by heart the places he likes to saale, delvan first and duvlin after, by dredgerous lands and devious delts

A learner rather Stephen's answer to Deasy who says You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong. (Episode 2, line 403 in the Gabler edition)

and with that he took the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck and by Jesus he near throttled him.

By thinking of things you could understand them.