"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 (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
— James Joyce

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"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

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. "
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

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

"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"
— James Joyce (The Dead)

"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 (Dubliners)

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."
— James Joyce

"...and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."
— 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? "
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday."
— James Joyce

"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."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"Shut your eyes and see."
— James Joyce

"A man's errors are his portals of discovery."
— James Joyce

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."
— James Joyce

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

"The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs VErschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. "
— James Joyce

"My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions."
— James Joyce

"I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women."
— James Joyce (Selected Letters)

"But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age; and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day.."
— James Joyce

"Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory."
— James Joyce (The Dead)

"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

"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."
— James Joyce

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
— James Joyce

"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."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead."
— 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 (Ulysses)

"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."
— James Joyce

"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not"
— James Joyce

"Too excited to be genuinely happy"
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"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

"Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor."
— James Joyce

"A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?"
— James Joyce (A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man)

"I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description"
— James Joyce (Lettres, tome 1)

"Love loves to love love."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"What did it avail to pray when he knew his soul lusted after its own destruction?"
— James Joyce

"But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running up the wires."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"There's no friends like the old friends."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Me. And me now."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear."
— James Joyce (Finnegans Wake)

"For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers."
— James Joyce (The Dead)

"if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life."
— James Joyce

"God made food; the devil the cooks."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)