James Joyce Quotations

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.

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

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

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

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

When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A corpse is meat gone bad. 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.

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

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.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

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

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

Night, Night. Tellmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of hitherandthithering waters of the Night!

No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast.

I belong to the faubourg Saint-Patrice called Ireland for short

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 want to work with the top people, because only they have the courage and the confidence and the risk-seeking profile that you need.

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

Our view is that the old consensus of $4 per share, which reflects analysts' current estimates of our entire business before the second-quarter action, is about the right estimate for our new continuing operations, excluding the special charges.

Today, there are not drug or vaccine treatments for a majority of those treatments. In the absence of treatments, our technology's positioned to be the first line of defense as a counter measure against those pathogens.

While you have a thing it can be taken from you... but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and partridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power

We did do very well in the transactions over $100 million that we chose to pursue, signing 11 and losing only one competitively, ... But the consistent deferral of mega-deals resulting from customers caution about their own businesses in this economic environment has had a significant impact on the growth of our outsourcing revenue.

We feel that the downside in IT demand is roughly offset by the benefits of the actions we have taken.

We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the frying pan of life into the fire of purgatory.

Every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow.

The workers were in the hole, ... They heard some popping sounds and they came out. They don't know if they affected the electrical service or if the electrical service went sour for some other reason.

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!

No, it did lots of other things too.

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's designed to capture viruses from your entire blood system. It's designed to capture viruses before cells and organs can be infected.

By the age of 45, I knew I could no longer start a sentence with a mention of strudel. My fingers would want to do it but my mind just wouldn't react.

I regard him as the whitest man I know. He is down on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be shown.

Ireland is the sow that eats her own farrow

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.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

Shut your eyes and see.

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

Absence, the highest form of presence.

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

You can still die when the sun is shining.

When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.

Our souls, shame-wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

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

I see the regions of snow and ice, I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn, I see the seal-seeker in his boat poising his lance, I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge drawn by dogs, I see the porpoise-hunters, I see the whale-crews of the south Pacific and the north Atlantic, I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys of Switzerland - I mark the long winters and the isolation.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.

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.

Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascent to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable lonliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.

The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and, as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flourfattened sauce. Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him.

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.

Thought is the thought of thought.

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

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.

Love loves to love love.

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

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

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

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

There's no friends like the old friends.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

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

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

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.

Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

I am proud to be an emotionalist.

In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame.

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.

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

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.

And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget--the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature.

My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out.

Life is too short to read a bad book.

Fall if you will, but rise you must.