Quotes from James Joyce

First we feel. Then we fall.

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.

You can still die when the sun is shining.

Let my country die for me.

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

God made food; the devil the cooks.

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Too excited to be genuinely happy

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Have read little and understood less.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

As you are now so once were we.

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.' Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.

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

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.