Ulysses

by James Joyce

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

We obey them in the grave.

Mourning coaches drawn up, drowning their grief. A pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we’ll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation. Elixir of life.

Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But in the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of hearts. All for a shadow. Consort not even a king. Her son was the substance. Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back, waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground: and lie no more in her warm bed.

Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

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

was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted.

You take my breath away. It is not perchance a French compliment? Mr O’Madden Burke asked. ’Tis the hour, methinks, when the winejug, metaphorically speaking, is most grateful in Ye ancient hostelry.

How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream.

Eat drink and be merry.

God made food, the devil the cooks.

Look at what I’m standing drinks to! Cold water and gingerpop! Two fellows that would suck whisky off a sore leg.

Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas.

The life esoteric is not for ordinary person.

People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be,

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother.

We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.

The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.

Pogue mahone! Acushla machree! It’s destroyed we are from this day! It’s destroyed we are surely!

A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil.

Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten.

The cup that cheers but not inebriates, as the old saying has it.

Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them.

Think you’re the only pebble on the beach? Does that to all.

Did she fall or was she pushed? he asked her. She answered, slighting: —Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies.

What’s your cry? Glass of bitter?

Damn her. O, well, she has to live like the rest.

Ah! Ow! Don’t be talking! I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.

straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda.

For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.

What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who’s talking about...? —Dead! says Alf. He’s no more dead than you are. —Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.

And says Joe: —Could you make a hole in another pint? —Could a swim duck? says I.

No, rejoined the other, I appreciate to the full the motives which actuate your conduct and I shall discharge the office you entrust to me consoled by the reflection that, though the errand be one of sorrow, this proof of your confidence sweetens in some measure the bitterness of the cup.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own.

’Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

That’s your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the earth. The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber on the face of God’s earth and their land in the hands of a dozen gamehogs and cottonball barons. That’s the great empire they boast about of drudges and whipped serfs. —On which the sun never rises, says Joe.

As true as I’m drinking this porter if he was at his last gasp he’d try to downface you that dying was living.

There were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm.

His dark eyes fixed themselves on her again drinking in her every contour, literally worshipping at her shrine. If ever there was undisguised admiration in a man’s passionate gaze it was there plain to be seen on that man’s face.

If she saw that magic lure in his eyes there would be no holding back for her. Love laughs at locksmiths.

I kissed her shoulder. Wish I had a full length oilpainting of her then. June that was too I wooed. The year returns. History repeats itself. Ye crags and peaks I’m with you once again.

So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

Love, lie and be handsome for tomorrow we die.

Hopeless thing sand. Nothing grows in it. All fades.

And they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents they brew out a brewage like to mead.

For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.

Now drink we, quod he, of this mazer and quaff ye this mead which is not indeed parcel of my body but my soul’s bodiment. Leave ye fraction of bread to them that live by bread alone.