James Joyce Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

—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.