Quotes by James Joyce
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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.

A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

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.

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

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

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

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

Every bond is a bond to sorrow.

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

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

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.

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

Love loves to love love.

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

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

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.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.

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

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

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

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

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

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

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

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

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

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

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

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

Life is the great teacher.

Nations have their ego, just like individuals.