Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

104. “Wipe your glasses with what you know.”

— James Joyce

105. “Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Reading Quotes

106. “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”

— James Joyce

107. “My puns are not trivial. They are quadrivial.”

— James Joyce

108. “The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and ‘re-embody’ it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.”

— James Joyce

109. “O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

111. “By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Real Quotes

112. “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.”

— James Joyce

113. “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.”

— James Joyce

114. “First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

116. “The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside.”

— James Joyce

117. “The only decent people I ever saw at the racecourse were horses.”

— James Joyce

118. “You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.”

— James Joyce

119. “All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light...”

— James Joyce

120. “La gente aguantaba que les mordiera un lobo pero lo que verdaderamente les sacaba de quicio era que les mordiera una oveja.”

— James Joyce

121. “If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

122. “Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.”

— James Joyce

123. “A way a lone a last a loved a long the –.”

— James Joyce

124. “So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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

— James Joyce

126. “Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

127. “Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pahrce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

129. “We can’t change the world, but we can change the subject.”

— James Joyce

130. “Unsheathe your dagger definitions; Horseness is the Whatness of All Horse...”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

132. “You can still die when the sun is shining.”

— James Joyce

133. “No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.”

— James Joyce

Featured in: Country Quotes

134. “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

— James Joyce

135. “And you’ll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, till whensday.”

— James Joyce

136. “As you are now so once were we.”

— James Joyce

137. “I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play.”

— James Joyce

138. “A nation is the same people living in the same place.”

— James Joyce

139. “Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”

— James Joyce

140. “Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free.”

— James Joyce

141. “If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door.”

— James Joyce

142. “She would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free.”

— James Joyce

143. “Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?”

— James Joyce

144. “Gentle lady, do not sing Sad songs about the end of love; Lay aside sadness and sing How love that passes is enough. Sing about the long deep sleep Of lovers that are dead, and how In the grave all love shall sleep: Love is aweary now.”

— James Joyce

145. “Love me. Love my umbrella.”

— James Joyce

146. “An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion.”

— James Joyce

147. “All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her.”

— James Joyce

148. “I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.”

— James Joyce

149. “Early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically.”

— James Joyce

150. “Oh rocks!′ says Molly Bloom, drumming her fingers in impatience. ‘Tell us in plain words.”

— James Joyce