James Joyce Quotes

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.

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

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.

Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.

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

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

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

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

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

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

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.

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

Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.

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

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails

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

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

—Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.—I will take the risk, said Stephen.—And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.

Every life is 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.

What was after the universe?Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?