James Joyce Quotes (163 Quotes)

If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus.

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

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

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

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.

In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.

You can still die when the sun is shining.

School and home seem to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.

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

What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete.

It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything.

You could get a book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy.

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.

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

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

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.

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

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

If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.

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

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

A wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart, and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of, or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory..

There's no friends like the old friends.

In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

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

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

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

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. 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 I allow myself to use silence, exile and cunning.

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.

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

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

When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

My love is in a light attire
Among the apple-trees,
Where the gay winds do most desire
To run in companies.

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

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

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.

Love is unhappy when love is away!

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

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

And soon shall love dissolved be
When over us the wild winds blow -- -
But you, dear love, too dear to me,
Alas!

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.

Through the clear mirror of your eyes,
Through the soft sigh of kiss to kiss,
Desolate winds assail with cries
The shadowy garden where love is.

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