Explore Quotes by James Joyce

God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.

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

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another s soul.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.

Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

While you have a thing it can be taken from you…..but when you give it, you have given it. no robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuee! Nuee! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream . . . there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears . . . for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

God made food; the devil the cooks.

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.

I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.

[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.