Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “So beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf.”

— James Joyce

202. “What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level:.”

— James Joyce

203. “God and morality and religion come first.”

— James Joyce

204. “It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.”

— James Joyce

205. “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore.”

— James Joyce

206. “But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”

— James Joyce

207. “Sentimentality is unearned emotion.”

— James Joyce

208. “Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”

— James Joyce

209. “Redheaded women buck like goats.”

— James Joyce

210. “White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.”

— James Joyce

211. “I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.”

— James Joyce

212. “His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.”

— James Joyce

213. “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

— James Joyce

214. “Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.”

— James Joyce

215. “Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.”

— James Joyce

216. “Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky line, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand: and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.”

— James Joyce

217. “And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird’s life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird’s heart?”

— James Joyce

218. “After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding.”

— James Joyce

219. “When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.”

— James Joyce

220. “Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.”

— James Joyce

221. “Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.”

— James Joyce

222. “I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.”

— James Joyce

223. “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”

— James Joyce

224. “Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and a bottle.”

— James Joyce

225. “I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

— James Joyce

226. “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.”

— James Joyce

227. “Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself.”

— James Joyce

228. “He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”

— James Joyce

229. “Too excited to be genuinely happy.”

— James Joyce

230. “The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.”

— James Joyce

231. “Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On.”

— James Joyce

232. “Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”

— James Joyce

233. “He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall.”

— James Joyce

234. “What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”

— James Joyce

235. “That is god... A shout in the street,′ Stephen answered...”

— James Joyce

236. “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.”

— James Joyce

237. “God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You.”

— James Joyce

238. “Love, yes. Word known to all men.”

— James Joyce

239. “Here Comes Everybody.”

— James Joyce

240. “Shite and onions!”

— James Joyce

241. “Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.”

— James Joyce

242. “The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric.”

— James Joyce

243. “Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.”

— James Joyce

244. “He used to call her Poppens out of fun.”

— James Joyce

245. “He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains.”

— James Joyce

246. “Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.”

— James Joyce

247. “I think a child should be allowed to take his father’s or mother’s name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.”

— James Joyce

248. “England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is dying.”

— James Joyce

249. “The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire o fits burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires. they were quenched; and the cold darkness filled chaos.”

— James Joyce

250. “It was cold autumn weather, but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse; every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow.”

— James Joyce