Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

354. “So weenybeenyveenyteeny.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

357. “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

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

— James Joyce

359. “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

360. “More mud, more crocodiles.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

363. “Lips kissed, kissing kissed.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

365. “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

366. “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

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

— James Joyce

368. “Deal with him, Hemingway!”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— James Joyce

375. “Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. He strode down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire. they streamed upwards before his anguished eyes in dense and maddening fumes and passed away above him till at last the air was clear and cold again.”

— James Joyce

376. “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

377. “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

378. “Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.”

— James Joyce

379. “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

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

— James Joyce

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “Grace before Glutton. For what we are, gifs a gross if we are, about to believe.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

386. “There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. 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

387. “Never back a woman you defend, never get quit of a friend on whom you depend, never make face to a foe till he’s rife and never get stuck to another man’s pfife.”

— James Joyce

388. “All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.”

— James Joyce

389. “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

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

— James Joyce

391. “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

392. “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

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

— James Joyce

394. “The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended.”

— James Joyce

395. “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

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

— James Joyce

397. “There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman.”

— James Joyce

398. “O the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless patient consciousness through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting long slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight, radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever vaster, farther and more impalpable.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce