James Joyce Quotes

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

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Have read little and understood less.

As you are now so once were we.

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?

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

His soul swooned softly 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.

If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.’ Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.