100 Top Quotes By James Joyce, The Author Of Ulysses
The 20th century was one of the most thriving eras of literature as some of the greatest literary giants were born during this time. And while talking of the greatest, one cannot just miss out on James Joyce, the Irish novelist and poet who immensely contributed to modernist avant-garde and was one of the most influential and important authors of the century. His 1922 work ‘Ulysses’ is a masterpiece or landmark of success as it exhibits Joyce’s talent for writing and storytelling. In it, he employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and virtually every other established literary technique to present his characters. His writing style soon gave him a celebrity status in the literary society. However, the phenomenal success of ‘Ulysses’ isn’t the only thing that Joyce’s literary career stands out for. His other works are equally successful and noteworthy, right from short story ‘Dubliners’ to novels, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’. Joyce’s unconventional style, exploration of language and new literary forms were not just visible in his fictional and non-fictional works but also in his quotes wherein he dealt with life’s truth in an avant-garde way. Stream through this section and get your hands on some of the most famous and prominent quotes by James Joyce.
Shut your eyes and see.
Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.
His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Love loves to love love.
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
Every life is in 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.
They lived and laughed and loved and left.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.
Life is too short to read a bad book.
Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
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.
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.
Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.
Too excited to be genuinely happy
My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.
The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.
God made food; the devil the cooks.
