Quotes from James Joyce

One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.

It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.

The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton--Parnell--never a man.

O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?

Love, yes. Word known to all men.

The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.

They lived and laughed and loved and left.

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.

God made food; the devil the cooks.

And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me. And so was his father.

He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?

Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.

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.