Finnegans Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it. — Toni Morrison

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. — James Joyce

Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low. — James Joyce

And suddenly the world was filled with wooden faces and flat voices - and, you were alone. — Patricia Cornwell

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso. — Philip Larkin

You cannot be afraid, Read the book. Smile at it. It's a great book-the greatest book you've ever read. — Markus Zusak

Suck it yourself, sugarstick! — James Joyce

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake. — Leslie Fiedler

For the first time, we live in a society that shows any sign of the possibility of women changing this condition. — Frederick Lenz

The ultimate fighter does not rely on his hands or feet to defeat his opponent, but rather his mind. — M.J. Stoddard

'Finnegans Wake,' 'Alice and Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' live on my bedside table back home in London. — Elizabeth Jagger

Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life". I hope to examine both of them further, doing more justice to Joycean comedy than I did in my "invitation" to the Wake, and trying to understand how the extraordinary stylistic innovations, particularly the proliferation of narrative forms, enable Joyce to "see life foully" from a vast number of sides. — Philip Kitcher

The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and while he was only and long and always good Dook Umphrey for the hungerlean splapeens of Lucalizod and Chimbers to his cronies it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody — James Joyce

He has to conceal what he would most wish to make public, and make public what he would most wish to conceal. — Winston Churchill

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may - need is the word I use - to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. — Roger Ebert

A new buoyancy took over, the buoyancy of arrival. It brings with it a renewed sense of being that blossoms just before the end of a journey. No matter how long or tiring the journey, the bothersome bits are shelved and forgotten in those final minutes. Impending arrival shifts the traveller's mindset into hopeful optimism that a new and unexplored phase is about to begin. — Monisha Rajesh

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols. — Marshall McLuhan

'Power Rangers' has changed a lot of lives. — Jason David Frank

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

You drive me wild, Brook. I don't know if I can control myself around you much longer. — Kitty Berry

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology. — William Gaddis

Faith is the new, the mysterious, the surprising. Nobody has ever been there before. — Carter Heyward

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. — Joyce Carol Oates

But that's not the way love goes. You show the good, disguise the bad. — Eric Jerome Dickey

I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business. — Helen DeWitt

If your mind is scattered, it is quite powerless. Distraction here and there opens the way for counterproductive emotions, leading to many kinds of trouble. — Dalai Lama XIV

The first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. — Seamus Deane

Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pahrce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish. — James Joyce

For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten "toptypsical" meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite. — Philip Kitcher

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources
Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake. — Umberto Eco

I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as he explained to me, the meaning in Finnegans Wake is obscure because it is a 'nightpiece.' I think, too, that, like the author's sight, the work is often blurred. — Sylvia Beach

The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel. — Dennis Miller

I'm always so surprised when people fill their homes up with stuff. — David Karp

Indian cinema seems to be growing very well at its own pace. — Brad Pitt