James Joyce Quotes - Page 11

Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.

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.

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.

...rapid motion through space elates one.

Have read little and understood less.

I'll tickle his catastrophe.

Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.

Every bond is a bond to sorrow.

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.

Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.

Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.

What did it avail to pray when he knew his soul lusted after its own destruction?

Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more. She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she?

Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth... Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.

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.

Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all.... he is a complete man as well, a good man.

Shaw's works make me admire the magnificent tolerance and broadmindedness of the english.

Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.

Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand: and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.