James Joyce Quotes

He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.

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

Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places.

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

Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Graduall...

Each imagining himself to be the first last and only alone, whereas he is neither first last nor las...

Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all.

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominanc...

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures o...

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, n...

... I've a thirst on me I wouldn't sell for half a crown.- Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.- Wine ...

The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and ...

Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved h...

Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.

So beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thin...

Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history...

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

The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue...

Look at the woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost.

It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to ...

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

Let my country die for me.

She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband.

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

He laughed to free his mind from his minds bondage.

What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that wa...

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

And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverb...

You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think?

ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made ...

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

My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twic...

You ask me why I don’t love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire ...

He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.

And you’ll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, t...

Here's lumbos. Where misties swaddlum, where misches lodge none, where mystries pour kind on, O slee...

For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in print...

Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?

Never back a woman you defend, never get quit of a friend on whom you depend, never make face to a f...

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be. Northmen's thing made southfolk's place but howmulty plurato...

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something lar...

He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became...

He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human ...

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses.

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

Gentle lady, do not sing Sad songs about the end of love;Lay aside sadness and sing How love that pa...

The soul ... has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of...

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in ...

—Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be sep...

His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. Hi...

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom m...

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

A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: ...

And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursui...

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CH...

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed ...

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

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

By thinking of things you could understand them.

—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?—I said that I had lost the faith, Step...

God and religion before every thing!' Dante cried. 'God and religion before the world.' Mr Casey rai...

To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slo...

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

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and str...

Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in the copious easy-chair besid...

—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of ...

God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.

What was after the universe?Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stop...

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

What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it sto...

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fea...

One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glor...

Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely re...

You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I...

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

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and str...

The eyes, too, were reptilelike in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their l...

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips a...

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer be...

There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! ...

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from...

Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague spe...

The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the god of ...

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

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

‎I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing...

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

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatesoever is grave and constant in h...

Every life is many days day after day. We walk through ourselves meeting robbers ghosts giants ...

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

To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no bett...

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country...

Early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep i...

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

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Pa...

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

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

Every bond is a bond to sorrow.