James Joyce: Trending quotes (page 4)

“Have read little and understood less.”

“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.”

“Let my country die for me.”

“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.”

“As you are now so once were we.”

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

“My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.”

“The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.”

“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

“This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.”

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

“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.”

“I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”

“What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds.”

“The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.”

“Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”

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

“Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.”

“All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.”