100 Top Quotes By James Joyce, The Author Of Ulysses

Shut your eyes and see.

  

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

Think , Yourself

  

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.

Like , Me

  

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.

Life , Like , Past

  

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

Trying

  

Love loves to love love.

  

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

  

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

  

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

Like , Music

  

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

Like

  

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

Me

  

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.

Life

  

They lived and laughed and loved and left.

  

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

  

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

Like

  

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

Like

  

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

  

The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

  

Life is too short to read a bad book.

Life

  

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

  

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Experience , Time

  

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

  

One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

  

Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

  

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

  

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

Life , Like , Together

  

Too excited to be genuinely happy

  

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

  

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

  

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

Life

  

God made food; the devil the cooks.

  

You can still die when the sun is shining.

  

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

  

Have read little and understood less.

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

Life

  

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

  

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.

Me

  

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

Past

  

As you are now so once were we.

  

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.

  

First we feel. Then we fall.

  

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

  

There's no friends like the old friends.

Like

  

Let my country die for me.

Me

  

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

Life , Me

  

Redheaded women buck like goats.

Like

  

Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!

  

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

  

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

  

He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

  

What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds.

  

Me. And me now.

Me

  

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

  

Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.

Character

  

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

  

What did it avail to pray when he knew his soul lusted after its own destruction?

  

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

Think

  

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

  

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

  

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

Music

  

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

Time

  

When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…

  

His soul swooned softly 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.

Like

  

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

Time

  

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

Like , Time

  

Every bond is a bond to sorrow.

  

Thought is the thought of thought.

  

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!

  

I am proud to be an emotionalist.

  

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

  

Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.

Life

  

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.

Like

  

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

Me

  

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.

  

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

Life

  

I'll tickle his catastrophe.

  

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

  

Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory.

Life , Like , Together

  

In the particular is contained the universal.

  

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

  

Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear.

  

When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart.

  

I have left my book, I have left my room, For I heard you singing Through the gloom.

Singing

  

Be just before you are generous.

  

I am other I now.

  

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

Experience , Life

  

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

  

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

  

I'd love to have the whole place swimming in roses

  

Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

Life

  

No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.

Think

  

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.

Past

  

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.

Life

  

The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. NON SERVIAM!

Me

  

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.

  

Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?

  

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