Quotes from James Joyce

A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.

A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. the wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.

maestro di color che sanno.

The cheers died away in the soft grey air. He was alone. He was happy and free; but he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan. He would be very quiet and obedient: and he wished that he could do something kind for him to show him that he was not proud.

He added in a preacher's tone: —For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

Father Bernard Vaughan's sermon first. Christ or Pilate? Christ, but don't keep us all night over it.

They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.

Cat's away the mice will play.

There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something.

her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

I am the boy that can enjoy invisibility

Alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving

He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.

A man who swears before the world to love a woman till death part him and her is sane neither in the opinion of the philosopher who understands what mutability is nor in the opinion of the man of the world who understands that it is safer to be a witness than an actor in such affairs. A man who swears to do something which it is not in his power to do is not accounted a sane man.

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.

O, you poor fellow! Out there in the rain all that time! I forgot that.

Of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity — home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance.

She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all the things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot, Snot-green, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane, But he adds: in bodies. The he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured.

And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.

Creación desde la nada. ¿Qué tiene en el bolso? Un engendro con el cordón umbilical arrastrando, amorrado en paño bermejo. El cordón de todos enlaza con el pasado, cable cabitrenzado de toda carne. Por eso los monjes místicos. ¿Querríais ser como dioses? Miraos vuestro omphalos. ¡Oiga! Aquí Kinch. Pón-game con Villaedén. Alef, alfa: cero, cero, uno.