
Shut your eyes and see.

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

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 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.

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

Love loves to love love.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

As you are now so once were we.

There's no friends like the old friends.

Let my country die for me.

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

Redheaded women buck like goats.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I am other I now.

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

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

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.

I'll tickle his catastrophe.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Be just before you are generous.
![[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/james-joyce-24578.jpg)
[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving 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.

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

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

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.

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

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?