Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”

— James Joyce

52. “My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.”

— James Joyce

53. “And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me. And so was his father.”

— James Joyce

54. “Children must be educated by love, not punishment.”

— James Joyce

55. “A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.”

— James Joyce

56. “Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.”

— James Joyce

57. “All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.”

— James Joyce

58. “People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.”

— James Joyce

59. “You cannot eat your cake and have it.”

— James Joyce

60. “Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.”

— James Joyce

61. “He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”

— James Joyce

62. “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

— James Joyce

63. “Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.”

— James Joyce

64. “He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.”

— James Joyce

65. “My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.”

— James Joyce

66. “You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.”

— James Joyce

67. “A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

— James Joyce

68. “Men are governed by lines of intellect – women: by curves of emotion.”

— James Joyce

69. “This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.”

— James Joyce

70. “Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.”

— James Joyce

71. “Every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species.”

— James Joyce

72. “People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.”

— James Joyce

73. “Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.”

— James Joyce

74. “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

— James Joyce

75. “No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.”

— James Joyce

76. “I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.”

— James Joyce

77. “A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk.”

— James Joyce

78. “Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”

— James Joyce

79. “The light music of whiskey falling into a glass – an agreeable interlude.”

— James Joyce

80. “Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.”

— James Joyce

81. “Places remember events.”

— James Joyce

82. “That ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.”

— James Joyce

83. “All human history moves towards one great goal.”

— James Joyce

84. “I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?”

— James Joyce

85. “The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously.”

— James Joyce

86. “Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory.”

— James Joyce

87. “My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.”

— James Joyce

88. “Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.”

— James Joyce

89. “The end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen path and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

91. “What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.”

— James Joyce

92. “In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!”

— James Joyce

93. “I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on.”

— James Joyce

94. “Nations have their ego, just like individuals.”

— James Joyce

95. “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.”

— James Joyce

96. “The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.”

— James Joyce

97. “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.”

— James Joyce

98. “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.”

— James Joyce

99. “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”

— James Joyce

100. “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.”

— James Joyce