James Joyce Quotes - Page 6

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.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings 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.

My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out.

What is better than to sit at the end of the day and drink wine with friends, or substitutes for friends?

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.

British Beatitudes! ... Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.

I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

[...] a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

Love, yes. Word known to all men.

White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea! How simple and beautiful was life after all!

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.

I've been working hard on [Ulysses] all day," said Joyce. Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said. Two sentences," said Joyce. I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of [French novelist Gustave] Flaubert. "You've been seeking the mot juste?" I said. No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.

No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.

Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

Masturbation! The amazing availability of it!

In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

Our souls, shame-wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.