Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Redheaded women buck like goats.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

203. “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

204. “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

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

— James Joyce

206. “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

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

— James Joyce

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

214. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

218. “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

219. “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

220. “Too excited to be genuinely happy.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

226. “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

227. “Here Comes Everybody.”

— James Joyce

228. “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

229. “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

230. “Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

232. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

235. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.”

— James Joyce

243. “Shite and onions!”

— James Joyce

244. “The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue...”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

246. “The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.”

— James Joyce

247. “I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses.”

— James Joyce

248. “In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”

— James Joyce

249. “O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.”

— James Joyce

250. “Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M’Carthy took the floor. Heatwave. Won’t last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.”

— James Joyce