James Joyce Quotes

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“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, Ulysses

“...et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, naturamque nouat. (to arts unknown he bends his wits, and alters nature.)”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“[James] Joyce... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized....”
― Tom Stoppard, Travesties

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

“I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.”
― James Joyce

“The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.”
― James Joyce

“You know the difference between right and wrong,' he repeated finally. 'Man, why did you need Initiation—by the Golden Dawn, or by anybody else? You are a genius, a sage, a giant among men. You have solved the problem which philosophers have been debating since antiquity—the mystery about which no two nations or tribes have ever agreed, and no two men or women have ever agreed, and no intelligent person has ever agreed totally with himself from one day to the next. You know the difference between right and wrong. I am overawed. I swoon. I figuratively kiss your feet.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati

“I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter , published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of Ulysses did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line 'Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter.' So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“This [Ulysses] is obviously the wave of the future, I'm glad I'm dying of tuberculosis.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“Grace before Glutton. For what we are, gifs a gross if we are, about to believe.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Chuck Norris doesn't need to understand the work of James Joyce; James Joyce needs to understand the work of Chuck Norris.”
― Brian Celio

“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call 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, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use---silence, exile and cunning.”
― James Joyce, (Annotated) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ...

“His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures - on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens.”
― James Joyce, A Little Cloud

“Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

They call them stupid. They understand what we say
better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,'" he's saying, bending over to gaze down into the deli case. His breath is fogging the glass. I'm watching it suddenly. Watching him. "'He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart-'"
"'Liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes,'" I say, and I'm sure I sound a little stunned. I'm not used to boys coming into the deli to quote some of my favorite modernist literature. Even I can't resist that. A boy like him, who, from the first moment, seems to love the things I love.”
― Phoebe North, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“It was not his nature to believe that he should engage in any kind of meddling or become actively involved in politics. His vocation lay in the fulfillment of a poetic mission, and he wanted to carry that mission out to the last detail, conscientiously and freely. In this sense he cursed "the disturbance of war," not because he overvalued his cultural role and saw his special poetic work endangered but because to him, in the final analysis, war meant the victory of barbarism, with the result that any kind of cultural work -- and therefore his, too -- could become involved in a bloody power struggle and be destroyed.”
― Carola Giedion-Welcker

“The sad quiet greyblue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen's heart. All that had been denied them had been freely given to him, the eldest: but the quiet glow of evening showed him in their faces no sign of rancour.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly throughout the universe and faintly falling, like the decent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce

“But it's the life of Paris, that's the thing. Ah, there's no city like Paris for gaiety, movement, excitement...”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“That paragraph. It’s not the work of an author, but maybe five lines. It’s those five lines that will get me reluctantly to explore the rest of the guy’s work. But that paragraph I’ve never forgotten. There’s that paragraph ‘Snow was general all over Ireland.’ It described the snow. It’s Montreal. It’s our snow, our black iron gates in Montreal. It was perfect.”
― Leonard Cohen

“The spoken language is a symbolization of something that happened, could have happened, or is in the process of happening, while the written language is a symbolization of the spoken language. James Joyce, for example, dedicated his life to trying to close the gap between the two systems. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce portrays in writing the workings of the verbal parts of the brain.”
― Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture

“It is only by imposing a naïve and unexamined aesthetic of their own, [Tzvetan] Todorov proposes, that modern scholars are able to declare so confidently that certain parts of the ancient text could not belong with others: the supposedly primitive narrative is subjected by scholars to tacit laws like the law of stylistic unity, of noncontradiction, of nondigression, of nonrepetition, and by these dim but purportedly universal lights is found to be composite, deficient, or incoherent. If just these four laws were applied respectively to Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Tristram Shandy, and Jealousy, each of these novels would have to be relegated to the dustbin of shoddily “redacted” literary scraps.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. 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.”
- The Dead”
― James Joyce, The Dead and Other Stories from Dubliners

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Taking a little more than is good for him. Absinthe, the greeneyed monster. I know him. He’s a gentleman, a poet. It’s alright.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“This is Zürich for me: The old town that reeks of Dada, James Joyce and Cabaret Voltaire.”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)