Best 343 quotes of James Joyce on MyQuotes

James Joyce

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    James Joyce

    Absence, the highest form of presence.

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    James Joyce

    A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he knew it was in God's power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy.

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    James Joyce

    A Classical style... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.

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    James Joyce

    A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

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    James Joyce

    [...] a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

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    James Joyce

    A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

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    James Joyce

    All human history moves towards one great goal

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    James Joyce

    All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

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    James Joyce

    Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or RĂ©aumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.

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    James Joyce

    Always see a fellows weak point in his wife.

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    James Joyce

    A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

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    James Joyce

    A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

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    James Joyce

    And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

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    James Joyce

    And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget--the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature.

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    James Joyce

    And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me. And so was his father.

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    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 one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history.

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    James Joyce

    And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

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    James Joyce

    and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

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    James Joyce

    An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.

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    James Joyce

    An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.

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    James Joyce

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

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    James Joyce

    A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

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    James Joyce

    Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth... 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.

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    James Joyce

    A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.

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    James Joyce

    A woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out.

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    James Joyce

    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.

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    James Joyce

    Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

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    James Joyce

    Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman.

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    James Joyce

    British Beatitudes! ... Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.

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    James Joyce

    Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are... Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead.

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    James Joyce

    Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

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    James Joyce

    But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

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    James Joyce

    But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.

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    James Joyce

    By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care (saving them for later use, that is), seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

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    James Joyce

    By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

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    James Joyce

    Children must be educated by love, not punishment.

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    James Joyce

    Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

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    James Joyce

    Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

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    James Joyce

    Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.

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    James Joyce

    Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time.

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    James Joyce

    Does nobody understand?

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    James Joyce

    Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.

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    James Joyce

    Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.

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    James Joyce

    Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand: and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

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    James Joyce

    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.

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    James Joyce

    Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

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    James Joyce

    Every life is in 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.

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    James Joyce

    Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

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    James Joyce

    Every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.

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    James Joyce

    First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.