Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

411. “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

412. “He went up to his room after dinner in order to be alone with his soul: and at every step his soul seemed to sigh: at every step his soul mounted with his feet, sighing in the ascent, through a region of viscid gloom.”

— James Joyce

413. “He had tales of distant countries.”

— James Joyce

414. “She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had not the moral courage to resist her.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

416. “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

417. “Let there be fight? And there was.”

— James Joyce

418. “No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast.”

— James Joyce

419. “Quotation marks quotato marks! Bah!”

— James Joyce

420. “OMNIUM GATHERUM.”

— James Joyce

421. “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

422. “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

423. “We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination.”

— James Joyce

424. “A woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out.”

— James Joyce

425. “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

426. “Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else. That’s what life is after all.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

428. “We are foolish, comic, motionless, corrupted, yet we are worthy of sympathy too.”

— James Joyce

429. “Well, Tommy, he said, I wish you and yours every joy in life, old chap, and tons of money, and may you never die till I shoot you. And that’s the wish of a sincere friend, an old friend. You know that?”

— James Joyce

430. “But it’s the life of Paris, that’s the thing. Ah, there’s no city like Paris for gaiety, movement, excitement...”

— James Joyce

431. “They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.”

— James Joyce

432. “One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.”

— James Joyce

433. “The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures – on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens.”

— James Joyce

434. “Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.”

— James Joyce

435. “If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.”

— James Joyce

436. “Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures in each our word. Today’s truth, tomorrow’s trend.”

— James Joyce

437. “He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them. He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already of the way.”

— James Joyce

438. “Then, in that case, all the rest, all that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest before me now, in fact... O, give it up old chap! Sleep it off!”

— James Joyce

439. “His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom.”

— James Joyce

440. “When she had gone he said, laughing: – We call it D. B. C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed Dedalus on Hamlet. Haines opened his newbought book. – I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground. of all minds that have lost their balance.”

— James Joyce

441. “Pincushions. I’m a long time threatening to buy one. Sticking them all over the place. Needles in window curtains.”

— James Joyce

442. “Shaw’s works make me admire the magnificent tolerance and broadmindedness of the english.”

— James Joyce

443. “He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already.”

— James Joyce

444. “The eyes, too, were reptilelike in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shriveled soul, poignant and selfembittered.”

— James Joyce

445. “Havvah-ban-Annah.”

— James Joyce

446. “There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?”

— James Joyce

447. “He had to undress and then kneel and say his own prayers before the gas was lowered so that he might not go to hell when he died.”

— James Joyce

448. “Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.”

— James Joyce

449. “He heard the sob passing loudly down his father’s throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse. The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light. His.”

— James Joyce

450. “I am not likely to die of bashfulness but neither am I prepared to be crucified to attest the perfection of my art. I dislike to hear of any stray heroics on the prowl for me.”

— James Joyce