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James Joyce Quotes
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James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses , a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners , and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake . His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism.

Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. A brilliant student, he briefly attended the Christian Brothers-run O'Connell School before excelling at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's unpredictable finances. He went on to attend University College Dublin.

In 1904, in his early twenties, Joyce emigrated to continental Europe with his partner Nora Barnacle. They lived in Trieste, Paris, and Zürich. Although most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe centres on Dublin and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses, he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." Wikipedia  

✵ 2. February 1882 – 13. January 1941
James Joyce photo
James Joyce: 191   quotes 33   likes

James Joyce Quotes

“As you are now so once were we.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

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

James Joyce book Dubliners

"Araby"
Source: Dubliners (1914)

Anger

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

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life , Country

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

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Heart

“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.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

Source: Dubliners

“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.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Understanding , Reality

“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.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

World , Time

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

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Age , Change , Night

“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.”

James Joyce

Letter to Augusta Gregory (22 November 1902), from James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1959) [Oxford University Press, 1983 edition, <small> ISBN 0-195-03381-7</small>] (p. 107)

Faith , Soul , Light , Change

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Heart Touching , Mother's Day , For Parents , For Mother

“Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Notebook entry, Paris (28 March 1903), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, 2002, <small> ISBN 0-192-83353-7</small>], p. 104
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Art , Intelligence

“I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.”

James Joyce

Source: About his wife, Nora. Selected Letters of James Joyce. http://www.slate.com/id/2181165

Women , Thinking

“There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.”

James Joyce

Letter to Augusta Gregory (22 November 1902), from James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1959) [Oxford University Press, 1983 edition, <small> ISBN 0-195-03381-7</small>] (p. 107)

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Boy , Time , Baby

“When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Feeling , Reading

“I am proud to be an emotionalist.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Thought is the thought of thought.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“Every bond is a bond to sorrow.”

James Joyce

“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 book The Dead

Dubliners (1914)
Variant: His soul swooned softly 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.
Source: "The Dead"
Context: 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 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.

Soul , Universe , Dead

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

James Joyce book The Dead

Dubliners (1914)
Variant: One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
Source: "The Dead"

Age , World , Passion

“She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

Source: Dubliners

Way

“She would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Love , World , Dreams , Heart

“In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Page 104
Source: Finnegans Wake (1939)

“To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life , Art , Freedom

“if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

"A Painful Case"
Source: Dubliners (1914)
Context: One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.

Love , Friendship

“People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

People , Wolf

“What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“I think of you so often you have no idea.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Idea , Thinking

“He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

Source: Dubliners

Feeling , Waiting , Night

“Be just before you are generous.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear.”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Source: Finnegans Wake

“I'd love to have the whole place swimming in roses”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Love

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

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Smile , Horse

“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.”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Source: Finnegans Wake

Love , Way , Past

“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.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life , World , Way , Reality

“Absence, the highest form of presence.”

James Joyce

“I am other I now.”

James Joyce

“Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

Life , Reading