Ulysses

by James Joyce

Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

I remember only ideas and sensations.

They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted.

Vain patience to heap and hoard.

All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Must be careful about women. Catch them once with their pants down. Never forgive you after.

In the midst of death we are in life.

Drowning they say is the pleasantest.

In the lexicon of youth

to ask him about planes of consciousness.

From the fathers

if the God Almighty’s truth was known.

The hungry famished gull Flaps o’er the waters dull.

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 deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian said, friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering together a sheaf of our younger poets’ verses. We are all looking forward anxiously.

urge me to wreak their will.

I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from the son.

a child of storm,

Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life.

Belief in himself has been untimely killed.

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

We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge. A dark back went before them, step of a pard, down, out by the gateway, under portcullis barbs.

Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street.

Invincible ignorance.

Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint.

Well, of course, where there’s money going there’s always someone to pick it up.

Money moves between countries

Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.

blub lips agrin,

Tink to her pity cried a diner’s bell.

ryebloom

Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drank off his chalice tiny, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound eyes went after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering, a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze.

He puffed a pungent plumy blast.

— When love absorbs my ardent soul ... Roll of Bensoulbenjamin rolled to the quivery loveshivery roofpanes.

Language of love.

a silent roar.

The thrill they itch for.

Circumcised? says Joe. — Ay, says I. A bit off the top.

The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero.

A couched spear of acuminated granite rested by him while at his feet reposed a savage animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by hoarse growls and spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time by tranquilising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of paleolithic stone.

And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth and behind him there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race.

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.

the discharge of jivic rays

He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker. — Ruling passion strong in death,

The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate before us.

The learned prelate who administered the last comforts of holy religion to the hero martyr when about to pay the death penalty knelt in a most christian spirit in a pool of rainwater, his cassock above his hoary head, and offered up to the throne of grace fervent prayers of supplication. Hand by the block stood the grim figure of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a tengallon pot with two circular perforated apertures through which his eyes glowered furiously. As he awaited the fatal signal he tested the edge of his horrible weapon by honing it upon his brawny forearm or decapitated in rapid succession a flock of sheep which had been provided by the admirers of his fell but necessary office.

Keep reading

Then suffer me to take your hand, said he. The goodness of your heart, I feel sure, will dictate to you better than my inadequate words the expressions which are most suitable to convey an emotion whose poignancy, were I to give vent to my feelings, would deprive me even of speech.

And what was it only one of the smutty yankee pictures Terry borrows off of Corny Kelleher. Secrets for enlarging your private parts. Misconduct of society belle. Norman W. Tupper, wealthy Chicago contractor, finds pretty but faithless wife in lap of officer Taylor. Belle in her bloomers misconducting herself, and her fancyman feeling for her tickles and Norman W. Tupper bouncing in with his peashooter just in time to be late after she doing the trick of the loop with officer Taylor.