Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pity is 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.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
They lived and laughed and loved and left.
JAMES JOYCE, Finnegan's Wake
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.
JAMES JOYCE, "The Dead," Dubliners
- How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
- Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling.
JAMES JOYCE, "She Weeps Over Rahoon," Pomes Penyeach
My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
JAMES JOYCE, "Araby," Dubliners
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
JAMES JOYCE, letter to Augusta Gregory, Nov. 22, 1902
In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!
JAMES JOYCE, Finnegan's Wake
The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.
JAMES JOYCE, interview, Vanity Fair, Mar. 1922
Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.
JAMES JOYCE, "A Painful Case," Dubliners
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
JAMES JOYCE, letter to Fanny Guillermet, Sep. 5, 1918
First we feel. Then we fall.
JAMES JOYCE, Finnegan's Wake
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.
JAMES JOYCE, "A Suave Philosophy," Dublin Daily Express, Feb. 6, 1903
Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.
JAMES JOYCE, "The Dead," Dubliners
The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton--Parnell--never a man.
JAMES JOYCE, interview, Vanity Fair, Mar. 1922
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.
JAMES JOYCE, letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Nov. 24, 1926
The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.
JAMES JOYCE, Stephen Hero
She dealt with moral problems the way a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind.
JAMES JOYCE, "The Boarding House," Dubliners
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.
JAMES JOYCE, a lecture on James Clarence Mangan delivered at the Literary and Historical Society, University College, Dublin, Feb. 1, 1902
I laugh at it today, now that I have had all the good of it. Let the bridge blow up, provided I have got my troops across... Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.
JAMES JOYCE, on Ulysses, attributed, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (Deming, 1997)
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.
JAMES JOYCE, notes for his play Exiles
In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen.
JAMES JOYCE, Finnegan's Wake
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 a 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.
JAMES JOYCE, "A Little Cloud," Dubliners
To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor.
JAMES JOYCE, lecture delivered at Università Popolare, Trieste, Feb. 27-28, 1912
You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.
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.
JAMES JOYCE, letter to Augusta Gregory, Nov. 22, 1902
|
