Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Agenbite of Inwit.”

— James Joyce

353. “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

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

— James Joyce

Featured in: Book Quotes

355. “His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand.”

— James Joyce

356. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

359. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

363. “So weenybeenyveenyteeny.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

365. “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

366. “Every word of it was for him. Against his sin, foul and secret, the whole wrath of God was aimed. The preacher’s knife had probed deeply into his diseased conscience and he felt now that his soul was festering in sin.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

368. “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

369. “Lips kissed, kissing kissed.”

— James Joyce

370. “Deal with him, Hemingway!”

— James Joyce

371. “More mud, more crocodiles.”

— James Joyce

372. “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

373. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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

— James Joyce

383. “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

384. “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

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

— James Joyce

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places.”

— James Joyce

390. “There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

392. “He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points.”

— James Joyce

393. “Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.”

— James Joyce

394. “Could it be that he, Stephen Dedalus, had done those things? His conscience sighed in answer. Yes, he had done them, secretly, filthily, time after time, and, hardened in sinful impenitence, he had dared to wear the mask of holinesss before the tabernacle itself while his soul within was a living mass of corruption.”

— James Joyce

395. “YesIsaidyesyesyesyesyes... YesIsaidyes! andagainyesyesyes – Molly Bloom.”

— James Joyce

396. “With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.”

— James Joyce

397. “Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.”

— James Joyce

398. “It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.”

— James Joyce

399. “Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?”

— James Joyce

400. “It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.”

— James Joyce