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James Joyce
(February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941) Irish Novelist, Short-story writer and Poet
See also: Ulysses
- All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.
- Letter (November 22, 1902)
- There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
- Letter (November 22, 1902)
- Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.
- "A Suave Philosophy," in Daily Express (Dublin, February 6, 1903)
- I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
- "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," Lecture (April 27, 1907)
- Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
- "The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran," in Piccolo della Sera (Trieste, September 5, 1912)
- Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
- Letter (September 5 1918)
- And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
- Ulysses (1922); Last lines of the novel. This is a famous passage often known as "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy" and has been used as the basis for the song "The Sensual World" by Kate Bush, and another called "Yes" by the musical artist Amber .
- One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.
- referring to Finnegans Wake in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver(November 24, 1926)
- Does nobody understand?'
- Last words (January 1941)
- This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By epiphany— a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that the themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.
- My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
Dubliners (1914)
- He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.
- One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
- “But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”
- "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
- . . . but there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. 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 predicate in the past tense.
Finnegans Wake (1939)
- Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pahrce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish. (4.15-17)
- But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus (12.32-33)
- For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Filstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined (may his forehead be darkened with mud who would sunder!) till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor. (20.10-18)
- came at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial fermament one tide on another (29.30)
- in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language in any sinse of the world (83.10-12)
- 'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry (115.36)
- Can you nei do her, numb? asks Dolph, suspecting the answer know. Oikkont, ken you, ninny? asks Kev, expecting the answer guess. (286.25-27)
- Three quarks for Muster Mark! (383.1)
- These lines were the source of the name of the particular entities known in modern physics as Quarks
- We expect you are, honest Shaun, we agreed, but from franking machines, limricked, that in the end it may well turn out, we hear to be you, our belated, who will bear these open letter. Speak to us of Emailia. (410.20-23)
- The last word in stolentelling! (424.35)
- He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim! (496.34 - 497.3)
- End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. (628.13 to 3.3)
Attributed:
- Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
- I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
- I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words. and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
- I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
- I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.
- I want to work with the top people, because only they have the courage and the confidence and the risk-seeking profile that you need.
- Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
- Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.
- Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.
- Never let us do wrong, because our opponents did so. Let us, rather, by doing right, show them what they ought to have done, and establish a rule the dictates of reason and conscience, rather than of the angry passions.
- Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
- The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
- The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
- The feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer
- Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
- You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.
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