Quotes from James Joyce

Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut!

We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination.

Life, he himself once said.. is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our bread-winning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn.

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.

A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars.

He had felt proud and happy then, happy that she was his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage.

Like the tender fire of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory. He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy.

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.

Till tree from tree, tree among trees tree over tree become stone to stone, stone between stones, stone under stone for ever. O Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees of each of these thy unlitten ones! Grant sleep in hour's time, O Loud! That they take no chill. That they do ming no merder. That they shall not gomeet madhowiatrees. Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughter low!

Here Comes Everybody.

her who whose beauty is not like earthly beauty, dangerous to look upon, but like the morning star which is its emblem, bright and musical.

A duodene of bird notes chirruped bright treble answer under sensitive hand. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording, called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love's leave-taking, life's, love's morn.

What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete.

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

Now patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience.

Stephen picks up on Armstrong's pier, and calls Kingstown pier a disappointed bridge (2.22). He's joking about the fact that Ireland wanted to be connected to continental Europe but ended up being extremely isolated.

What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say good night and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make to Stephen, noctambulist?

Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use?silence, exile, and cunning.

Oh rocks!' says Molly Bloom, drumming her fingers in impatience. 'Tell us in plain words.

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.

She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impressarios?

O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh

Life seemed to him a gift; the statement 'I am alive' seemed to him to contain a satisfactory certainty and many other things, held up as indubitable, seemed to him uncertain.