James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born 2 February 1882, Rathgar, Ireland — died 13 January 1941, Zürich, Switzerland) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet and literary critic. His major works, pioneering the 'stream of consciousness' style, are the novels Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is widely considered as one of the 20th century's most influential and important writers.
Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.Shut your eyes and see.And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.Love loves to love love.The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.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 immortality.History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.
James Joyce
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
James Joyce
You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.
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.Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.They lived and laughed and loved and left.There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. 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 falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
James Joyce
Your battles inspired me – not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.When I die, Dublin will be written in my heart.Life is too short to read a bad book.But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
James Joyce
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.A nation is the same people living in the same place.Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.Nations have their ego, just like individuals.Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.First kiss does the trick. The propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop.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.I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.First we feel. Then we fall.Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.God made food; the devil the cooks.Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.You can still die when the sun is shining.To learn, one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.Absence, the highest form of presence.All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.Fall if you will, but rise you must.Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies.Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.Too excited to be genuinely happy.A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.Men are governed by lines of intellect – women by curves of emotion.Have read little and understood less.When a man is born... there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.I am proud to be an emotionalist.And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
