Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Deal with him, Hemingway!”

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

— James Joyce

354. “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

355. “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

356. “More mud, more crocodiles.”

— James Joyce

357. “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

358. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— James Joyce

365. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

368. “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

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

— James Joyce

370. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— James Joyce

380. “If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus.”

— James Joyce

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— James Joyce

385. “Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self.”

— James Joyce

386. “He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.”

— James Joyce

387. “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

388. “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

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

— James Joyce

390. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

393. “The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire, or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.”

— James Joyce

394. “Quotation marks quotato marks! Bah!”

— James Joyce

395. “It was hard work-a hard life-but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.”

— James Joyce

396. “The sad quiet grey-blue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen’s heart.”

— James Joyce

397. “Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.”

— James Joyce

398. “Her beliefs were not extravagant. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.”

— James Joyce

399. “Ullahbluh! Sehyoh narar, pokehole sann! Manhead very dirty by am anoyato. Like old Dolldy Icon when he cooked up his iggs in bicon. He gatovit and me gotafit and Oalgoak’s Cheloven gut a fudden. Povar old pitschobed! Molodeztious.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce