Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Does nobody understand?”

— James Joyce

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world’s culture.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— James Joyce

364. “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

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

— James Joyce

Featured in: Book Quotes

366. “Make me feel good in the moontime.”

— James Joyce

367. “Now patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

369. “By thinking of things you could understand them.”

— James Joyce

370. “Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.”

— James Joyce

371. “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

372. “Here, and it goes on to appear now, she comes, a peacefugle, a parody’s bird, a peri potmother, a pringlpik in the ilandiskippy, with peewee and powwows in beggybaggy on her bickybacky and a flick flask fleckflinging its pixylighting pacts’ huemeramybows, picking here, pecking there, pussypussy plunderpussy.”

— James Joyce

373. “Lips kissed, kissing kissed.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

375. “Time was to sin and to enjoy, time was to scoff at God and at the warnings of His holy church, time was to defy His majesty, to disobey His commands, to hoodwink one’s fellow men, to commit sin after sin and to hide one’s corruption from the sight of men.”

— James Joyce

376. “I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description.”

— James Joyce

377. “Deal with him, Hemingway!”

— James Joyce

378. “School and home seem to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.”

— James Joyce

379. “So weenybeenyveenyteeny.”

— James Joyce

380. “Do you know what Ireland is?′ asked Stephen with cold violence. ‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

— James Joyce

381. “He is a bold man who, in his writing, dares to alter – even further to distort – what he has seen and heard.”

— James Joyce

382. “There was cold sunlight outside the window.”

— James Joyce

383. “Always see a fellows weak point in his wife.”

— James Joyce

384. “Knock knock. War’s where! Which war? The Twwinns. Knock knock. Woos without! Without what? An apple. Knock knock.”

— James Joyce

385. “I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.”

— James Joyce

386. “If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn’t have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives’ spits.”

— James Joyce

387. “More mud, more crocodiles.”

— James Joyce

388. “It is their segnall for old Champelysied to seek the shades of his retirement and for young Chappielassies to tear a round and tease their partners lovesoftfun at Finnegan’s Wake.”

— James Joyce

389. “Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.”

— James Joyce

390. “He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart before which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood.”

— James Joyce

391. “What? Corpus. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupifies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don’t seem to chew it; only swallow it down.”

— James Joyce

392. “But I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?”

— James Joyce

393. “She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impressarios?”

— James Joyce

394. “There is only one thing that makes any one athlete better than another, his heart. We all put our underwear on feet first, so we are all human.”

— James Joyce

395. “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatesoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.”

— James Joyce

396. “He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder.”

— James Joyce

397. “Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascent to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable lonliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own.”

— James Joyce

398. “In the ignorance that implies the impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.”

— James Joyce

399. “It made me sad to see your eyes. I cannot say why.”

— James Joyce

400. “The bright stars fade. A voiceless song sang from within, singing: the morn is breaking.”

— James Joyce