JAMES JOYCE QUOTES
Irish novelist and poet (1882-1941)
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History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.
Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.
Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.
The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Life is the great teacher.
Our souls, shame-wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.
Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world.
We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be tell the end of the chapter.... A priest-ridden Godforsaken race.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Rather upsets a man's day a funeral does.
Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Coming events cast their shadows before.
Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.
Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Never know whose thoughts you're chewing.
Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Every life is 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.
Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.
O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
There's many a true word spoken in jest.
First kiss does the trick. The propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop.
Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.
Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time.
In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
We are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.
Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry.
JAMES JOYCE, Finnegan's Wake
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
JAMES JOYCE, on Ulysses, attributed, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (Deming, 1997)
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
JAMES JOYCE, Giacomo Joyce
Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
JAMES JOYCE, "The Dead," Dubliners
In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious--but as for psychoanalysis, it's neither more nor less than blackmail.
JAMES JOYCE, interview, Vanity Fair, Mar. 1922
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.
JAMES JOYCE, interview w/ Max Eastman, Harper's Magazine (1929?)
But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus.
JAMES JOYCE, Finnegan's Wake
If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. 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, attributed, James Joyce (Ellmann, 1959)
There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquillity of the evening or at the feast at midnight when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.
Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and a bottle.
Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.
JAMES JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I don't want to die. Damn death. Long live life!
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