James joyce quotes

All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.

White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.

Masturbation! The amazing availability of it!

Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.

As I am. As I am. All or not at all.

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. You can see for yourself how many different ways they might be arranged.

But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

Life is too short to read a bad book.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

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

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

There's no friends like the old friends.

Nations have their ego, just like individuals.

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

Love loves to love love.

We are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.

When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.

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

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies.

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

Always see a fellows weak point in his wife.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

Children must be educated by love, not punishment.

Love me. Love my umbrella.

Redheaded women buck like goats.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascent to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable lonliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatesoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.

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.

Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.

White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea! How simple and beautiful was life after all!

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.

I am proud to be an emotionalist.

What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

Wipe your glasses with what you know.

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

An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.

By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial

God made food; the devil the cooks.

[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

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.

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

Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.

The artist... standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams - 'a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty.' To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success.

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.

The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and a bottle.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

The only decent people I ever saw at the racecourse were horses.

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Thought is the thought of thought.

You can still die when the sun is shining.

Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another s soul.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

Places remember events.

To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.

The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.

We are bound together by the sympathy of our antipathies.

Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

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.

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

While you have a thing it can be taken from you…..but when you give it, you have given it. no robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?

Shut your eyes and see.

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

Absence, the highest form of presence.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

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.

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

In the particular is contained the universal.

British Beatitudes! ... Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

[...] a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.

All human history moves towards one great goal

As you are now so once were we.

Let my country die for me.

Tenors get women by the score.

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

There's many a true word spoken in jest.

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

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

Winds of May, that dance on the sea, Dancing a ring-around in glee From furrow to furrow, while overhead The foam flies up to be garlanded, In silvery arches spanning the air, Saw you my true love anywhere? Welladay! Welladay! For the winds of May! Love is unhappy when love is away!

Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman.

Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.

Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness.

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.

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

They lived and laughed and loved and left.

Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.

Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.

Fall if you will, but rise you must.