Quotes from James Joyce

the modern mind...is interested above all in subtleties, equivocations and the subterranean complexities which dominate the average man and compose his life....modern literature is concerned with the twilight, the passive rather than the active mind...those undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface. (Joyce to Arthur Power)

Why have women such eyes of witchery?

L'amor matris, genitivo, soggettivo e accusativo, è probabilmente l'unica cosa vera della vita. La paternità può essere una finzione legale.

Ecco che ponderava su cose che non sono state: cos'avrebbe fatto Cesare se fosse sopravvissuto per aver creduto alla veggente; cosa sarebbe potuto essere, le possibilità del possibile in quanto possibile...

His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk.

turning his fez menialstrait in the direction of Moscas, he first got rid of a few mitsmillers and hurooshoos

But the surest sign that his confession had been good and that he had had sincere sorrow for his sin was, he knew, the amendment of his life. —I have amended my life, have I not? he asked himself.

Tenía la costumbre de tratar los problemas morales como el carnicero a la carne, y en aquel caso había tomado la decisión

Cos'è uno spettro? [...] Uno che è svanito nell'impalpabilità per morte, per assenza, per cambiamento di usi.

He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place." ? James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

That is God ... A shout in the street.

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music." ? James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Mi hai fatto confessare le paure che sento. Ma ti dirò anche che cos'è che non mi fa paura. Non mi fa paura esser solo o venir sprezzato per un altro o lasciare tutto ciò che tocchi lasciare. E non mi fa paura commettere un errore, anche un grande errore, un errore che duri quanto la vita e magari tutta l'eternità.

No human being has ever stood so close to my soul as you stand.

And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm.

Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left of us then?

Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he would wake. The past was past.

en reuniones como ésta vienen a nuestra mente pensamientos tristes: el recuerdo del pasado, de la juventud, de los cambios, de rostros desaparecidos a los que echamos en falta esta noche. Nuestro viaje por la vida está jalonado de esos tristes recursos y, si tuviésemos que estar pensando en ellos todo momento, no encontraríamos el valor de acabar nuestra obra entre los vivos

the park's so dark by kindlelight. But look what you have in your handself!

We are right, he said, and the others are wrong. To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand- that is art.

Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.

He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly—an adventureless tale.

It's in the silence you feel you hear.

C ést le pigeon, Joseph.