The quotations of

James Joyce

Irish novelist and poet

1882–1941

38 quotes, most often on Love, Life & Death and Art.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Ulysses (1922), Ch. 2: NestorIn context
- History
(Of Shakespeare) A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Ulysses (1922) (243)
- Failure
- Genius
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Notebook entry, Paris (28 March 1903)In context
- Art
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.
Referring to Finnegans Wake in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (24 November 1926)
- Sleep
- Writing
He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
Stephen Hero (1944)
- Anti-Religion
- Christianity
I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.
Said in conversation with Frank Budgen, Zurich, 1918, as told by Budgen in his book James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (1934), ch. IV
- Writing
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.
Dubliners (1914), “The Dead”In context
- Age
- Life & Death
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.
To Djuna Barnes, in an interview published in Vanity Fair (March 1922)
- Writing
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Ulysses (1922), Part I, Episode 1In context
The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
Ulysses (1922), Part I, Episode 1In context
- Nature
It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.
Ulysses (1922), Part I, Episode 1In context
- Art
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
Ulysses (1922), Part I, Episode 2In context
- God
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.
Ulysses (1922), Part II, Episode 4In context
- Food
Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.
Ulysses (1922), Part II, Episode 6In context
- Comedy
Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship.
Ulysses (1922), Part II, Episode 9In context
- Philosophy

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