Quotes by James Joyce

About James Joyce:

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

James Joyce

Estaba destinado a aprender su propia sabiduría aparte de los otros o a aprender la sabiduría de los otros por sí mismo, errando entre las asechanzas del mundo.

James Joyce

—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

James Joyce

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

James Joyce

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, wi...

James Joyce

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelo...

James Joyce

Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of na...

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

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 a...

James Joyce

His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the mi...

James Joyce

The soul ... has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try ...

James Joyce

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?

James Joyce

What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think ...

James Joyce

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No it wa...

James Joyce

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” t...

James Joyce

Be just before you are generous.

James Joyce

You don't know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say?

James Joyce

She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband.

James Joyce

Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.

James Joyce

You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think?

James Joyce

What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?

James Joyce

Author Bio

  • NameJames Joyce
  • DescriptionIrish novelist and poet
  • AliasesDzho?s, Dzhe?ms Avgustin Aloizi?,
  • BornFebruary 2, 1882
  • DiedJanuary 13, 1941
  • CountryIreland
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Playwright; Novelist