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James Joyce Quotes

Irish novelist, Birth: 2-2-1882, Death: 13-1-1941 James Joyce Quotes
1.
People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.
James Joyce

'Individuals walk over blossoms, yet just to embrace a prickly pear.'
2.
Shut your eyes and see.
James Joyce

Close your eyes and envision.
3.
Absence, the highest form of presence.
James Joyce

'Distance, the ultimate nearness.'
4.
Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce

Errors are the gateways of revelation.
5.
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
James Joyce

'Time is an endless continuum, with no beginning or end; all is occurring in perpetual present.'
Similar Authors: Mark Twain C. S. Lewis Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Haruki Murakami Ayn Rand Charles Dickens George Eliot Albert Camus Kurt Vonnegut Victor Hugo Chuck Palahniuk Margaret Atwood Virginia Woolf Ernest Hemingway George R. R. Martin
6.
Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.
James Joyce

The output of your thoughts is equal to the input you invest.
7.
The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.
James Joyce

8.
Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
James Joyce

Quote Topics by James Joyce: Heart Men Art Life Writing Eye Long Love Mind Soul Beautiful People Running Fall Country Past Thinking Giving Book Night Imagination Names Race Father Water Mean Mistake Desire Glasses Ireland
9.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
James Joyce

10.
All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.
James Joyce

11.
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.
James Joyce

12.
Fall if you will, but rise you must.
James Joyce

13.
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
James Joyce

14.
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.
James Joyce

15.
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
James Joyce

16.
He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
James Joyce

17.
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
James Joyce

18.
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.
James Joyce

19.
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

20.
The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously
James Joyce

21.
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce

22.
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.
James Joyce

23.
They lived and laughed and loved and left.
James Joyce

24.
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.
James Joyce

25.
Love me. Love my umbrella.
James Joyce

26.
Love loves to love love.
James Joyce

27.
A Classical style... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.
James Joyce

28.
But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.
James Joyce

29.
No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.
James Joyce

30.
I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
James Joyce

31.
When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.
James Joyce

32.
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.
James Joyce

33.
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
James Joyce

34.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
James Joyce

35.
You can still die when the sun is shining.
James Joyce

36.
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
James Joyce

37.
Thought is the thought of thought.
James Joyce

38.
[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.
James Joyce

39.
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
James Joyce

40.
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.
James Joyce

41.
Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.
James Joyce

42.
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?
James Joyce

43.
When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the "Agamemnon."
James Joyce

44.
The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.
James Joyce

45.
Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.
James Joyce

46.
Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.
James Joyce

47.
To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.
James Joyce

48.
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.
James Joyce

49.
It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.
James Joyce

50.
Life is too short to read a bad book.
James Joyce