Quotes from James Joyce

It was lovely to be tired.

When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père?) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.

You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God. —There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.

Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent person to be wrongfully condemned.

935--If that is rhythm, said Lynch, let me hear what you call beauty: and, please remember, though I did eat a cake of cowdung once, that I admire only beauty.

Help! he sighed. I feel a strong weakness.

She passed into his soul forever.

But I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?

Visi atrodÄ— pavargÄ™ nuo gyvenimo, dar nepradÄ—jÄ™ gyventi.

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.

The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Reefer was a wenchman.

Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.

It's when it's all over that you'll miss him, said my aunt.

But it's the life of Paris, that's the thing. Ah, there's no city like Paris for gaiety, movement, excitement...

Stephen Dedalus / Class of Elements / Clongowes Wood College / Sallins / County Kildare / Ireland / Europe / The World / The Universe goodreads

There's music along the river For Love wanders there

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords.

He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret.

His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory - if anyone remembered him.

The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid's bow, Greekly perfect.

Se på havet. Hva bryr vel det seg om krenkelser? Buck Mulligan

and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes.