Explore Quotes by James Joyce

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 conscience of my race.

When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.

But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

His heart danced upon her movement like a cork upon a tide.

What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

When I die Dublin will be written on my heart.

The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously

O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

All fiction is autobiographical fantasy.

He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington but in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.

I see the regions of snow and ice, I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn, I see the seal-seeker in his boat poising his lance, I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge drawn by dogs, I see the porpoise-hunters, I see the whale-crews of the south Pacific and the north Atlantic, I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys of Switzerland - I mark the long winters and the isolation.

Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.