Dubliners

by James Joyce

But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

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

He might yet be able to settle down in some snug corner and live happily if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready.

But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr Mooney began to go to the devil.

Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look like a little perverse madonna.

Besides, young men like to feel that there is a young woman not very far away.

He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him.

“I wish you and yours every joy in life, old chap, and tons of money, and may you never die till I shoot you.

The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.

His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk.

One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame.

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed;

The shadow took her faded dress into shelter but fell revengefully into the little cup behind her collar-bone.

The arc of his social rise intersected the arc of his friend’s decline,

There were worse husbands. He had never been violent since the boys had grown up

His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points

“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”