James Joyce
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.Collection: Past
Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.Collection: Jesus
Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.Collection: Brother
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.Collection: Beautiful
Let my country die for me.Collection: Country
Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.Collection: Beautiful
British Beatitudes! ... Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.Collection: Beer
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.Collection: Life
Too excited to be genuinely happyCollection: Excited
White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea! How simple and beautiful was life after all!Collection: Beautiful
The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.Collection: God
When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the "Agamemnon."Collection: Thinking
No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Latin
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 tuckooCollection: Baby
There's no police like Holmes.Collection: Police
Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.Collection: Character
Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.Collection: Friday
What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds.Collection: Reality
Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?Collection: Names
And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.Collection: Lying
Masturbation! The amazing availability of it!Collection: Drinking
[...] a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.Collection: Shining
White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.Collection: Wine
By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.Collection: Real
You ask me why I don’t love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire to possess a person wholly, to admire and honour that person deeply, and to seek to secure that person’s happiness in every way is to “love” then perhaps my affection for you is a kind of love. I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence.Collection: Beautiful
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!Collection: Fall
The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.Collection: Sea
The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. NON SERVIAM!Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Eye
Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time.Collection: Wind
Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.Collection: Buddhism
The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, and impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them.Collection: Adventure
Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side; and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure.Collection: Running
Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.Collection: Attention
You cannot eat your cake and have it.Collection: Cake
That ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.Collection: Insomnia
Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.Collection: Father
The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.Collection: Action
Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.Collection: Reality
I'd love to have the whole place swimming in rosesCollection: Swimming
The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and, as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flourfattened sauce. Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him.Collection: Food
When I die Dublin will be written on my heart.Collection: Heart
The studious silence of the library ... Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness.Collection: Silence
Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant: non serviam: I will not serve. That instant was his [Lucifer's] ruin.Collection: Pride
What birds were they? (...) He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice be- hind the wainscot : a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.Collection: Fall
He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.Collection: Clouds
Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.Collection: Art