Famous James Joyce Quotations

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"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end."
by James Joyce
"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality."
by James Joyce
"A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."
by James Joyce
"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."
by James Joyce
"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."
by James Joyce
"Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America."
by James Joyce
"History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken."
by James Joyce
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
by James Joyce
"I call that a scumhead."
by James Joyce
"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."
by James Joyce
"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 mortality."
by James Joyce
"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."
by James Joyce
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
by James Joyce
"Night, Night. Tellmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of hitherandthithering waters of the Night!"
by James Joyce
"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."
by James Joyce
"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."
by James Joyce
"Why dont you write books people can read"
by Nora Joyce, to her husband James
"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins commited in previous lives."
by James Joyce
"No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination."
by James Joyce
"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."
by James Joyce
"When I heard the word stream uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon."
by James Joyce
"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."
by James Joyce
"Heart of my heart, were it more, More would be laid at your feet."
by James Joyce
"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."
by James Joyce
"Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. 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 uncreated conscience of my race."
by James Joyce
"Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police."
by James Joyce
"You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman."
by James Joyce
"James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them."
by James Baldwin
"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
by James Joyce
"An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile."
by James Joyce
"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother's love is not."
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."
by James Joyce
"There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being."
by James Joyce
"Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence."
by James Joyce
"A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk."
by James Joyce
"And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation..."
by James Joyce
"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 ..."
by James Joyce
"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..."
by James Joyce
"—Dead! says Alf. He's no more dead than you are. —Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow."
by James Joyce
"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..."
by James Joyce
"—I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart. —It does, Mr Bloom said...."
by James Joyce
"I am not likely to die of bashfulness but neither am I prepared to be crucified to attest the perfection of my art. I dislike to hear of any s..."
by James Joyce
"—He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one of your common or garden ... you know ... There's a touch of the art..."
by James Joyce
"If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognize m..."
by James Joyce
"Not the least vital of the problems which confront our country is the problem of her attitude towards those of her children who, having left h..."
by James Joyce
"O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea and the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda g..."
by James Joyce
"The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was fallin..."
by James Joyce
"The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime."
by James Joyce
"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..."
by James Joyce


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