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

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

James Joyce

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

James Joyce

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

James Joyce

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

James Joyce

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

James Joyce

My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

James Joyce

Nations have their ego, just like individuals.

James Joyce

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

James Joyce

Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

James Joyce

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didacti...

James Joyce

Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?...To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a p...

James Joyce

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives' spit...

James Joyce

He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.

James Joyce

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

James Joyce

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

James Joyce

‎I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.

James Joyce

Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.

James Joyce

If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door.

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