James Joyce Quotations

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

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

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

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

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.

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

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

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

It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.

He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.

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

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

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

When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.

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.

I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

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

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

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

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

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

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

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

The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

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

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

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

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.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

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

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the frying pan of life into the fire of purgatory.

We feel that the downside in IT demand is roughly offset by the benefits of the actions we have taken.

We did do very well in the transactions over $100 million that we chose to pursue, signing 11 and losing only one competitively, ... But the consistent deferral of mega-deals resulting from customers caution about their own businesses in this economic environment has had a significant impact on the growth of our outsourcing revenue.

The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and partridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power

No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast.

Night, Night. Tellmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of hitherandthithering waters of the Night!

I belong to the faubourg Saint-Patrice called Ireland for short

I want to work with the top people, because only they have the courage and the confidence and the risk-seeking profile that you need.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call 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 defence the only arms

It is a tragic case of overloading the back porches, ... use common sense.

Our view is that the old consensus of $4 per share, which reflects analysts' current estimates of our entire business before the second-quarter action, is about the right estimate for our new continuing operations, excluding the special charges.

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 for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

Today, there are not drug or vaccine treatments for a majority of those treatments. In the absence of treatments, our technology's positioned to be the first line of defense as a counter measure against those pathogens.

Every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow.

The workers were in the hole, ... They heard some popping sounds and they came out. They don't know if they affected the electrical service or if the electrical service went sour for some other reason.

As for Tolstoy, ... I disagree with you altogether. Tolstoy is a magnificent writer. He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!

According to his brother Stanislaus . . . 'Unhappiness was like a vice.' He was cold and distant except with those closest to him, but when, on his mother's death, he discovered a bundle of letters that his father had written to her before they were married, he spent the whole afternoon reading them 'with as little compunction as a doctor or a lawyer . . . puts questions.' When he had finished, Stanislaus asked him: 'Well?' 'Nothing,' James Joyce answered curtly and rather contemptuously. Nothing, thought Stanislaus, for the young poet with a mission, but clearly something for the woman who had kept them all those years of neglect and poverty.

a case of too many people in a small space.

Ever looked sufficiently at a quite everyday looking stamped addressed envelope? Admittedly it is an outer husk: its face, in all its featureful perfection of imperfection, is its fortune: it exhibits only the civil or military clothing of whatever p

It's designed to capture viruses from your entire blood system. It's designed to capture viruses before cells and organs can be infected.

No, it did lots of other things too.

The feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer

Ireland is the sow that eats her own farrow

I regard him as the whitest man I know. He is down on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be shown.

By the age of 45, I knew I could no longer start a sentence with a mention of strudel. My fingers would want to do it but my mind just wouldn't react.

I am who I am because of who I was.

Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.

Her companionship was like a warm soil about an exotic.

Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.

Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.

Signatures of all things I am here to read.

My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial

What birds were they? (...) He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice be- hind the wainscot : a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.

Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more. She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she?

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.

His heart danced upon her movement like a cork upon a tide.

What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

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

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

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

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

The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.

When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.

O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?

Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.

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.

A Classical style... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.

The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and 're-embody' it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.

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.

Never let us do wrong, because our opponents did so. Let us, rather, by doing right, show them what they ought to have done, and establish a rule the dictates of reason and conscience, rather than of the angry passions.

You cannot eat your cake and have it.

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

Heart of my heart, were it more, More would be laid at your feet.

Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

Always see a fellows weak point in his wife.

Places remember events.

Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand: and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.

He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington but in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.

What? Corpus. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupifies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don't seem to chew it; only swallow it down.

(...) You cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.

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

This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!