James Joyce Quotes & Sayings

If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European. — James Joyce

History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake. — James Joyce

I've been working hard on [Ulysses] all day," said Joyce.
Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said.
Two sentences," said Joyce.
I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of [French novelist Gustave] Flaubert. "You've been seeking the mot juste?" I said.
No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. — James Joyce

I am other I now. — James Joyce

For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers. — James Joyce

Mistakes are the portals of discovery. — James Joyce

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived. — James Joyce

So he had passed beyond the challenge of the sentries who had stood as guardians of his boyhood and had sought to keep him among them that he might be subject to them and serve their ends. Pride after satisfaction uplifted him like long slow waves. — James Joyce

A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winning post, his mane moonflowing, his eyeballs stars. — James Joyce

Here Comes Everybody. — James Joyce

Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music. — James Joyce

This is the way to the museyroom. Mind your boots goan out. — James Joyce

Nations have their ego, just like individuals. — James Joyce

Gentle lady, do not sing
Sad songs about the end of love;
Lay aside sadness and sing
How love that passes is enough.
Sing about the long deep sleep
Of lovers that are dead, and how
In the grave all love shall sleep:
Love is aweary now. — James Joyce

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. — James Joyce

He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. 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. — James Joyce

Never back a woman you defend, never get quit of a friend on whom you depend, never make face to a foe till he's rife and never get stuck to another man's pfife. — James Joyce

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies ? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here : lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps : damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus!* And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure. — James Joyce

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy. — James Joyce

But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age; and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day.. — James Joyce

Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity. — James Joyce

Be just before you are generous. — James Joyce

It was cold autumn weather, but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse; every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow. — James Joyce

General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free sex and a free lay church in a free lay state. — James Joyce

Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall. — James Joyce

One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the plague. Quicklime feverpits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes. Or bury at sea. Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds. Earth, fire, water. Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole life in a flash. But being brought back to life no. Can't bury in the air however. Out of a flying machine. Wonder — James Joyce

There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where? — James Joyce

As he crossed Grattan Bridge he looked down the river towards the lower quays and pitied the poor stunted houses. They seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled together along the riverbanks, their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night bid them arise, shake themselves and begone. — James Joyce

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. — James Joyce

There's the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. — James Joyce

Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are ... Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. — James Joyce

Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! — James Joyce

The music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of children. — James Joyce

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? — James Joyce

By thinking of things you could understand them. — James Joyce

Stand forth, Nayman of Noland (for no longer will I follow you obliquelike through the inspired form of the third person singular and the moods and hesitensies of the deponent but address myself to you, with the empirative of my vendettative, provocative and out direct), stand forth, come boldly, jolly me, move me, zwilling though I am, to laughter in your true colours ere you be back for ever till I give you your talkingto! — James Joyce

If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre? — James Joyce

Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name? — James Joyce

Grace before Glutton. For what we are, gifs a gross if we are, about to believe. — James Joyce

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

Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. — James Joyce

O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once. — James Joyce

And, as a mere matter of ficfect, I tell of myself how I popo possess the ripest littlums wifukie around the globelettes globes (...) — James Joyce

I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. — James Joyce

I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. — James Joyce

Silly women believe love is sighing I am dying still if he wrote it I suppose thered be some truth in it true or no it fills up your whole day and life always something to think about every moment and see it all around you like a new world — James Joyce

Love between man and woman is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse, and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse. — James Joyce

People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep. — James Joyce

Sparkling bronze azure eyed Blazure's skyblue bow and eyes. — James Joyce

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow. — James Joyce

Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. — James Joyce

He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:
I am not thinking of the offence to my mother. — James Joyce

His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. — James Joyce

If it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness. — James Joyce

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description — James Joyce

Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life. — James Joyce

The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot. — James Joyce

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven! — James Joyce

Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. Aristotle's entire system of philosophy rests upon his book of psychology and that, I think, rests on his statement that the same attribute cannot at the same time and in the same connexion belong to and not belong to the same subject. The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension. — James Joyce

He is gone from mortal haunts: O'Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the shaggy brow. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind. — James Joyce

In the particular is contained the universal. — James Joyce

One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature. — James Joyce

But Noodynaady's actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines. — James Joyce

What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces? — James Joyce

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be. — James Joyce

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. — James Joyce

Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?
He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him should by him not be told. — James Joyce

My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial — James Joyce

An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy. — James Joyce

(...) and, as a matter of fict, by my halfwife, (...) — James Joyce

If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity. — James Joyce

The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it. — James Joyce

The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet iris. — James Joyce

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

We'll meet again, we'll part once more. — James Joyce

His blade of human knowledge, natural astuteness particularized by long association with cases in the police courts, had been tempered by brief immersions in the waters of general philosophy. — James Joyce

Ay say aye. I affirmly swear to it that it rooly and cooly boolyhooly was with my holyhagionous lips continuously poised upon the rubricated annuals of saint ulstar. — James Joyce

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

Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history. — James Joyce

We who live under heaven, we of the clovery kindgom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land. — James Joyce

Ena milo melomon, frai is frau and swee is too, swee is two when swoo is free, ana mala woe is we! — James Joyce

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. — James Joyce

Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound. — James Joyce

Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment. — James Joyce

His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in revery at leas he had been acquainted with nobility. — James Joyce

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the master-stroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds thirteen and six. — James Joyce

He burned to appease the fierce longing of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside the savage desire within him to realise the enormities which he brooded on nothing was sacred. — James Joyce

He had to undress and then kneel and say his own prayers before the gas was lowered so that he might not go to hell when he died. — James Joyce

You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought. — James Joyce

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song : I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. her door was open : she wanted to hear my music. silent with aw and pity i went to her bedside. she was crying in her wretched bed for these words, Stephen : love's bitter mystery. — James Joyce

You ask me why I don't love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire to possess a person wholly, to admire and honour that person deeply, and to seek to secure that person's happiness in every way is to "love" then perhaps my affection for you is a kind of love. I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence. — James Joyce

For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. — James Joyce

His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. — James Joyce

Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foaming ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat. — James Joyce

..they were yung and easily freudened.. — James Joyce

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police. — James Joyce

You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think? — James Joyce

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. — James Joyce

Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every
telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. — James Joyce

All human history moves towards one great goal — James Joyce