Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision.”

— James Joyce

302. “Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains.”

— James Joyce

303. “He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment. His days and works and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul.”

— James Joyce

304. “He longed to be master of her strange mood.”

— James Joyce

305. “A headland, a ship, a sail upon the billows. Farewell. A lovely girl, her veil awave upon the wind upon the headland, wind around her.”

— James Joyce

306. “He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.”

— James Joyce

307. “A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes.”

— James Joyce

308. “My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity – home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines.”

— James Joyce

309. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life. A wild angel 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. On and on and on and on!”

— James Joyce

310. “Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy.”

— James Joyce

311. “Our souls, shame-wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.”

— James Joyce

312. “For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers.”

— James Joyce

313. “He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”

— James Joyce

314. “White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.”

— James Joyce

315. “Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?”

— James Joyce

316. “Kyrie ! The radiance of the intellect. I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind.”

— James Joyce

317. “We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more.”

— James Joyce

318. “Have read little and understood less.”

— James Joyce

319. “A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he knew it was in God’s power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy.”

— James Joyce

320. “Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.”

— James Joyce

321. “In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.”

— James Joyce

322. “I wish you and yours every joy in life, old chap, and tons of money, and may you never die till I shoot you.”

— James Joyce

323. “A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.”

— James Joyce

324. “The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high. – Mkgnao! – O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire. The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.”

— James Joyce

325. “O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me youve no chances at all inthis place like you used long ago I wish somebody would write me a loveletter...”

— James Joyce

326. “Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing.”

— James Joyce

327. “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.”

— James Joyce

328. “She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.”

— James Joyce

329. “Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.”

— James Joyce

330. “Does nobody understand?”

— James Joyce

331. “I don’t mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father’s house? MTo seek misfortune, was Stephen’s answer.”

— James Joyce

332. “The ree the ra the ree the ra the roo. Lord, I mustn’t lilt here.”

— James Joyce

333. “We are bound together by the sympathy of our antipathies.”

— James Joyce

334. “Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.”

— James Joyce

335. “The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions.”

— James Joyce

336. “Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about them.”

— James Joyce

337. “The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart.”

— James Joyce

338. “Agenbite of Inwit.”

— James Joyce

339. “It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. DIEU was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said DIEU then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying.”

— James Joyce

340. “Mother is packing my new secondhand clothes. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. 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 conscious of my race.”

— James Joyce

341. “You get a decent do at the Brazen Head.”

— James Joyce

342. “Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.”

— James Joyce

343. “If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?”

— James Joyce

344. “I have left my book, I have left my room, For I heard you singing Through the gloom.”

— James Joyce

345. “I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of the match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives.”

— James Joyce

346. “Bite my laughters, drink my tears. Pore into me, volumes, spell me stark and spill me swooning, I just don’t care what my thwarters think.”

— James Joyce

347. “But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?”

— James Joyce

348. “For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me.”

— James Joyce

349. “Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same breath. Wouldn’t know which to believe. One story good till you hear the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows over. Hail fellow well met the next moment.”

— James Joyce

350. “It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry.”

— James Joyce