Top 328 Quotes & Sayings by James Joyce - Page 2

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

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

Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.

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.

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.

and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.

An Irishman needs three things : silence, cunnning, and exile.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

Places remember events.

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. You can see for yourself how many different ways they might be arranged.

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

Redheaded women buck like goats.

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

The artist... standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams - 'a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty.' To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success.

We are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.

Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.

I am proud to be an emotionalist.

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.

When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.

There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.

Children must be educated by love, not punishment.

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.

Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

There's no friends like the old friends.

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

Thought is the thought of thought.

Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness.

God made food; the devil the cooks.

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

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

In the particular is contained the universal.

We are bound together by the sympathy of our antipathies.

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.

Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

Let my country die for me.

A woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out.

My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial

Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascent to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable lonliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.

Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out.

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls 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 and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.

You can still die when the sun is shining.

Life is the great teacher.

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.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

His soul swooned slowly 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.

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.