Top 500 James Joyce Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.”

— James Joyce

402. “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

403. “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

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

— James Joyce

405. “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

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

— James Joyce

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “Nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!”

— James Joyce

411. “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

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

— James Joyce

413. “OMNIUM GATHERUM.”

— James Joyce

414. “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

415. “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

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “Havvah-ban-Annah.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

429. “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

430. “She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me, was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri...”

— James Joyce

431. “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

432. “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

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

— James Joyce

434. “Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.”

— James Joyce

435. “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

436. “We’re as old as we feel, Johnny.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

438. “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

439. “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

440. “Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.”

— James Joyce

441. “When all things repose, do you alone Awake to hear the sweet harps play To Love before him on his way, And the night wind answering in antiphon Till night is overgone?”

— James Joyce

442. “And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.”

— James Joyce

443. “God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God.”

— James Joyce

444. “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

445. “Then I went to a certain nightclub. There were men there – and also women. At least, they looked like women.”

— James Joyce

446. “He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.”

— James Joyce

447. “His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen himself, a young and silent-mannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their distance from it.”

— James Joyce

448. “So he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.”

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

450. “Hushkah, a horn! Gadolmagtog! God es El?”

— James Joyce