Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I am not likely to die of bashfulness but neither am I prepared to be crucified to attest the perfection of my art. I dislike to hear of any stray heroics on the prowl for me.”

— James Joyce

452. “We’re as old as we feel, Johnny.”

— James Joyce

453. “And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn’t probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.”

— James Joyce

454. “So he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.”

— James Joyce

455. “Natural parents should bear in mind that the more supplementaries their children find, at school or elsewhere, the better they will know that it takes all sorts to make a world. Also, that though there is always the risk of being corrupted by bad parents, the natural ones may be – probably ten per cent of them actually are – the worst of the lot.”

— James Joyce

456. “Suck it yourself, sugarstick!”

— James Joyce

457. “Hushkah, a horn! Gadolmagtog! God es El?”

— James Joyce

458. “To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic.”

— James Joyce

459. “Yet too much happy bores. He stretched more, more. Are you not happy in your? Twang. It snapped.”

— James Joyce

460. “He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.”

— James Joyce

461. “His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen himself, a young and silent-mannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their distance from it.”

— James Joyce

462. “Ho, you pretty man, turn aside hither and I will show you a brave place, and she lay at him so flatteringly that she had him in her grot which is named Two-in-the-Bush or, by some learned, Carnal Concupiscence.”

— James Joyce

463. “We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with the hen in the storyaboot we start from scratch.”

— James Joyce

464. “Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet?”

— James Joyce

465. “I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as now was be past yester.”

— James Joyce

466. “With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never do.”

— James Joyce

467. “Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.”

— James Joyce

468. “Life, he himself once said... is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our bread-winning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn.”

— James Joyce

469. “Then, in that case, all the rest, all that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before me now, in fact... O, give it up old chap! Sleep it off!”

— James Joyce

470. “I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse.”

— James Joyce

471. “A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.”

— James Joyce

472. “His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in revery at leas he had been acquainted with nobility.”

— James Joyce

473. “Reefer was a wenchman.”

— James Joyce

474. “You could get a book then. There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy.”

— James Joyce

475. “A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. the wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.”

— James Joyce

476. “We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts.”

— James Joyce

477. “First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking.”

— James Joyce

478. “Will ye, ay or nay?”

— James Joyce

479. “God and the Blessed Virgin were too far from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure and holy.”

— James Joyce

480. “Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can’t understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn’t he have some spark of manhood about him?”

— James Joyce

481. “We who live under heaven, we of the clovery kindgom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land.”

— James Joyce

482. “The mockery of it! he said gaily.”

— James Joyce

483. “They listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine.”

— James Joyce

484. “Dear Hewitt Costello, Equerry, were daylighted with our outing and are looking backwards to our unearly summers.”

— James Joyce

485. “O, undoubtedly yes, and very potable so, but one who deeper thinks will always bear in the baccbuccus of his mind that this downright there you are and there it is is only all in his eye. Why?”

— James Joyce

486. “But it’s the life of Paris, that’s the thing. Ah, there’s no city like Paris for gaiety, movement, excitement...”

— James Joyce

487. “Life seemed to him a gift; the statement ‘I am alive’ seemed to him to contain a satisfactory certainty and many other things, held up as indubitable, seemed to him uncertain.”

— James Joyce

488. “A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.”

— James Joyce

489. “Let people get fond of each other: lure them on. Then tear asunder.”

— James Joyce

490. “The world is before you.”

— James Joyce

491. “But Noodynaady’s actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines.”

— James Joyce

492. “Ay say aye. I affirmly swear to it that it rooly and cooly boolyhooly was with my holyhagionous lips continuously poised upon the rubricated annuals of saint ulstar.”

— James Joyce

493. “Life is many days. This will end.”

— James Joyce

494. “With: Go Ferchios off to Allad out of this! An oldsteinsong. He threwed his fit up to his aers, rolled his poligone eyes, snivelled from his snose and blew the guff out of his hornypipe.”

— James Joyce

495. “What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco !”

— James Joyce

496. “He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.”

— James Joyce

497. “It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”

— James Joyce

498. “Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong hair growth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity, nude, white, still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet wine grapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.”

— James Joyce

499. “It is quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”

— James Joyce

500. “She was a little vulgar; sometimes she said “I seen” and “If I had’ve known.” But what would grammar matter if he really loved her?”

— James Joyce