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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

354. “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

355. “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

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

— James Joyce

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— James Joyce

358. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— 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. “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

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

— James Joyce

365. “So weenybeenyveenyteeny.”

— James Joyce

366. “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

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

— James Joyce

368. “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

369. “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

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

— James Joyce

372. “Deal with him, Hemingway!”

— James Joyce

373. “More mud, more crocodiles.”

— James Joyce

374. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

380. “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

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

— James Joyce

382. “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

383. “Lips kissed, kissing kissed.”

— James Joyce

384. “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

385. “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

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

— James Joyce

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— James Joyce

393. “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

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

— James Joyce

395. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

400. “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