Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Wipe your glasses with what you know.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

103. “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

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

— James Joyce

105. “To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— 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. “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.”

— James Joyce

110. “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

111. “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

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

— James Joyce

113. “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

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

— James Joyce

115. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

120. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

123. “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

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

— James Joyce

125. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

128. “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

129. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

133. “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

134. “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

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

— James Joyce

136. “Love me. Love my umbrella.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

138. “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

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

— James Joyce

140. “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

141. “Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

143. “If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.”

— James Joyce

144. “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.”

— James Joyce

145. “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. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.”

— James Joyce

146. “I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass.”

— James Joyce

147. “I am proud to be an emotionalist.”

— James Joyce

148. “All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: “O love! O love!” many times.”

— James Joyce

149. “What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?”

— James Joyce

150. “Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.”

— James Joyce