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James Joyce (1882 – 1941)


Irish novelist, short-story writer and poet.
James Joyce
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)
Joyce quotes
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
Joyce
The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt. The economic and intellectual conditions of his homeland do not permit the individual to develop. The spirit of the country has been weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties. Individual initiative has been paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while the body has been shackled by peelers, duty officers and soldiers. No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if from a country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove.




Joyce James quotes
[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.
Joyce James
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)
James Joyce quotes
I’ve lapped so long. As you said. It fair takes. If I lose my breath for a minute or two don’t speak, remember! Once it happened, so it may again. (625.27 - 625.29)
James Joyce
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.
Joyce James quotes
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) (FW003.15-17)
Joyce
When I hear 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 Tristram Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.
Joyce James
I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.
James Joyce
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.




James Joyce quotes
But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
James Joyce
I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.
Joyce quotes
Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.
Joyce James
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
Joyce James quotes
For hanigen with hunigen still haunt ahunt to finnd their hinnigen where Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled and anruly person creeked a jest. (FW332.4-7)
James Joyce
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 quotes
This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance:
—Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.
James Joyce
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
Joyce James
Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled:
— It has not epiphanised yet, he said.


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