James Joyce Quotes

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.

He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

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 living and the dead.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

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

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

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

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. 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.

Does nobody understand?

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.

The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

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

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.

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

Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.

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