19 Quotes Tagged: ulysses

Each imagining himself to be the first last and only alone, whereas he is neither first last nor last nor only not alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.

And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

"The book [Joyce's "Ulysses"] can just as well be read backwards, for it has no back and no front, no top and no bottom. Everything could easily have happened before, or might have happened afterwards. You can read any of the conversations just as pleasurably backwards, for you don't miss the point of the gags. Every sentence is a gag, but taken together they make no point. You can also stop in the middle of a sentence — the first half still makes sense enough to live by itself, or at least seems to. The whole work has the character of a worm cut in half, that can grow a new head or a new tail as required."

For always roaming with a hungry heart / Much have I seen and known.

And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.

Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

Be just before you are generous.

Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic.

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!

Shite and onions!

ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near
lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are
flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life
and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I
saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get
round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he
asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the
sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey
and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the
sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they
called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with
the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish
girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in
the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who
else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all
clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep
and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and
the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of
years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like
kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with
the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her
lover to kiss the iron and

(...) You cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.

I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.