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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 quotes33 likes

James Joyce Quotes

“No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

Source: Dubliners

“The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“I'll tickle his catastrophe.”

James Joyce

Source: Ulysses, 'Aeolus,' 'Lestrygonians,' 'Scylla And Charybdis,' & 'Wandering Rocks': A Facsimile Of Placards For Episodes 7 10

“Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?”

James Joyce

“[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

James Joyce

“Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.”

James Joyce

“Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.”

James Joyce

Source: Ulysses by James Joyce

“Gentle lady, do not sing
Sad songs about the end of love;
Lay aside sadness and sing
How love that passes is enough.

Sing about the long deep sleep
Of lovers that are dead, and how
In the grave all love shall sleep:
Love is aweary now.”

James Joyce book Chamber Music

Source: Chamber Music

“In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.”

James Joyce

“Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind.”

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

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”

James Joyce book The Dead

Source: The Dead

“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.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“More mud, more crocodiles.”

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

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Three quarks for Muster Mark! (383.1)”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

These lines were the source of the name of the particular entities known in modern physics as Quarks
Finnegans Wake (1939)

“I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

"Araby"
Dubliners (1914)

“Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled:”

James Joyce book Stephen Hero

It has not epiphanised yet, he said.
Stephen Hero (1944)

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

James Joyce

"The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran: England's Safety Valve in Case of War," Piccolo della Sera (Trieste, 5 September 1912), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, <small> ISBN 0-192-83353-7</small>], p. 203

“Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave”

James Joyce book Pomes Penyeach

A Flower Given To My Daughter, p. 11
Pomes Penyeach (1927)

“The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt. The economic and intellectual conditions of his homeland do not permit the individual to develop. The spirit of the country has been weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties. Individual initiative has been paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while the body has been shackled by peelers, duty officers and soldiers. No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if from a country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove.”

James Joyce

"Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," lecture, (27 April 1907), Università Popolare, Trieste, printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, <small> ISBN 0-192-83353-7</small>], p. 123

“I laugh at it today, now that I have had all the good of it. Let the bridge blow up, provided I have got my troops across… Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.”

James Joyce

On Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (1997) by Robert H. Deming, p. 22

“He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim!”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

496.34 - 497.3
Finnegans Wake (1939)

“Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.”

James Joyce

Notes (1913) http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/exiles.html#notes made by Joyce for his play Exiles

“in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

83.10-12
Finnegans Wake (1939)

“Vast wings above the lambent waters brood
Of sullen day.”

James Joyce book Pomes Penyeach

Flood, p. 16
Pomes Penyeach (1927)

“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.”

James Joyce

Interview with Max Eastman in Harper's Magazine, as quoted in James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann. Eastman noted "He smiled as he said that — smiled, and then repeated it."

“But toms will till. I know he well.”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Book I, Chapter 8
'time will tell'; 'I know he will / I know him well'
Finnegans Wake (1939)

“There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.”

James Joyce

To Jacques Mercanton, on the structure of Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (1997) by Robert H. Deming, p. 22

“He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?”

James Joyce book Stephen Hero

Stephen Hero (1944)

“I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.”

James Joyce

"Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," lecture, Università Popolare, Trieste (27 April 1907), 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. 125

“Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing!”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake (1939)

“The sly reeds whisper to the night
A name — her name”

James Joyce book Pomes Penyeach

Alone, p. 18
Pomes Penyeach (1927)

“(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle.”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake (1939)

“Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We'll meet again, we'll part once more. The spot I'll seek if the hour you'll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk's upset.”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake (1939)

“My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?”

James Joyce

From the poem I Hear an Army http://www.bartleby.com/103/128.html

“You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.”

James Joyce

Exiles (1915), Act II http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/exiles2.html

“Loveward above the glancing oar”

James Joyce book Pomes Penyeach

Watching The Needleboats At San Sabba, p. 10
Pomes Penyeach (1927)

“The fragrant hair,
Falling as through the silence falleth now
Dusk of the air.”

James Joyce book Pomes Penyeach

Tutto E Sciolto, p. 13
Pomes Penyeach (1927)

“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.”

James Joyce

"James Clarence Mangan" (1902)

“And mine a shielded heart for her
Who gathers simples of the moon.”

James Joyce book Pomes Penyeach

Simples, p. 15
Pomes Penyeach (1927)

“Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

115.36
Finnegans Wake (1939)

“We expect you are, honest Shaun, we agreed, but from franking machines, limricked, that in the end it may well turn out, we hear to be you, our belated, who will bear these open letter. Speak to us of Emailia.”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

410.20-23
Finnegans Wake (1939)

“I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Page 113
Finnegans Wake (1939)

“[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.”

James Joyce

James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe,” translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (1964): 24-25

“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”

James Joyce

Referring to Finnegans Wake in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (24 November 1926)

“the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld, for scarce one, or pathetically few of his dode canal sammenlivers cared seriously or for long to doubt with Kurt Iuld van Dijke (the gravitational pull perceived by certain fixed residents and the capture of uncertain comets chancedrifting through our system suggesting the authenticitatem of his aliquitudinis) he canonicity of his existence as a tesseract. Be still, O quick! Speak him dumb! Hush ye fronds of Ulma!”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

Source: Finnegans Wake (1939), p. 100