Quotes by James Joyce
A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am. Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful. My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for? For our freedom, said Davin. No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first. They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me. Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant... When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets ... Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.
Accept that all of us can be hurt, that all of us can--and surely will at times--fail. I think we should follow a simple rule if we can take the worst, take the risk.
Heart of my heart, were it more, More would be laid at your feet.
A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.
The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of ex...
When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.
History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.
I call that a scumhead.
Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.
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.
Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the ...
Night, Night. Tellmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of hitherandthithering waters of the Night!
By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind...
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
He winged away on a wildgoup's chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit's wa...
Everyone, whether cardinal or scientist, who believes that his own truth is complete and final must become a dogmatist...The more sincere his faith, the more he is bound to persecute, to save others from falling into error.
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
Those who have easy, cheerful attitudes tend to be happier than those with less pleasant temperaments, regardless of money, making it, or success.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins commited in previous lives.
Studies indicate that the one quality all successful people have is persistence. They're willing to spend more time accomplishing a task and to perservere in the face of many difficult odds. There's a very positive relationship between people's ability to accomplish any task and the time they're willing to spend on it.
