James Joyce

“La gente aguantaba que les mordiera un lobo pero lo que verdaderamente les sacaba de quicio era que les mordiera una oveja.”

“I am proud to be an emotionalist.”

“Everything in Paris is gay," said Ignatius Gallaher. "They believe in enjoying life--and don't you think they'reright? If you want to enjoy yourself properly you must go to Paris. And, mind you, they've a great feeling forthe Irish there. When they heard I was from Ireland they were ready to eat me, man.”

“I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But realadventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.”

“There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind, for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: I am not long for this world and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.”

“I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on.”

“Usher's Island”

“Era estranho, outrossim, que ele sentisse um árido prazer em seguir até o fim as rígidas linhas da doutrina da Igreja e penetrasse em tétricos silêncios apenas para ouvir e sentir mais profundamente a sua própria condenação. A frase de São Tiago que diz que aquele peca contra um mandamento se torna culpado por todos pareceu-lhe, no começo, oca, até que começou a sondar a treva do seu próprio estado. Da má semente da ambição todos os outros pecados mortais tinham saldado: orgulho de si próprio e desprezo pelos outros; avareza em guardar dinheiro para a compra de prazeres ilícitos; inveja daqueles cujos vícios não podia atingir; caluniosas murmurações contra os piedosos; voracidade em sentir os alimentos, a estúpida raiva em que ardia e no meio da qual examinava o seu tédio; o pântano de indolência espiritual e corporal dentro do qual todo o seu ser estava atolado.”

“Stand forth, Nayman of Noland (for no longer will I follow you obliquelike through the inspired form of the third person singular and the moods and hesitensies of the deponent but address myself to you, with the empirative of my vendettative, provocative and out direct), stand forth, come boldly, jolly me, move me, zwilling though I am, to laughter in your true colours ere you be back for ever till I give you your talkingto!”

“His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull.Flames burst forth from his skull like a corolla,shrieking like voices: -Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!”

“Your mind will give back exactly what you put into it.”

“Each imagining himself to be the first last and only alone, whereas he is neither first last nor last nor only not alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.”

“He imagined that he stood near Emma in a wide land and, humbly and in tears, bent and kissed the elbow of her sleeve.”

“Does nobody understand?”

“Beware the horns of a bull, the heels of the horse, and the smile of an Englishman.”

“The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”

“It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.”

“. . . for she was the only girl they loved, as she is the queenly pearl you prize, because of the way the night that first we met she is bound to be, methinks, and not in vain, the darling of my heart, sleeping in her april cot, within her singachamer, with her greengageflavoured candywhistle duetted to the crazyquilt, Isobel, she is so pretty, truth to tell, wildwood's eyes and primarose hair, quietly, all the woods so wild, in mauves of moss and daphnedews, how all so still she lay, neath of the whitethorn, child of tree, like some losthappy leaf, like blowing flower stilled, as fain would she anon, for soon again 'twill be, win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me!”

“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude...”

“He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.”

“I'd love to have the whole place swimming in roses”

“Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.”

“It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.”

“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.”

“Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O, you're vine! Sendday's eve and, ah you're vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again!”

“Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.... Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.”

“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 line there all round everything.[...]It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric?”

“An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.”

“I am, a stride at a time”

“A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.”

“Be just before you are generous.”

“(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of sings (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?”

“History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.”

“Deal with him, Hemingway!”

“Life is too short to read a bad book.”

“They have no mercy on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already.”

“Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events.”

“People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.”

“What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.”

“Let my country die for me.”

“Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.”

“To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.”

“He called me a jew, and in a heated fashion, offensively. So I, without deviating from plain facts in the least, told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too, and all his family, like me, though in reality I'm not. That was one for him. A soft answer turns away wrath. He hadn't a word to say for himself as everyone saw. Am I not right?”

“You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places. And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame.”

“Enigmas hastiados de su tiranía: tiranos, dispuestos a ser destronados,”

“No serás el dueño de otros ni tampoco su esclavo.”

“Luz dorada sobr el mar, sobre arena, sobre cantizales. El sol está ahí, los gráciles árboles, las casas limón.”

“You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to the fauborgh Saint Patrice called Ireland for short.—I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.—But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.”

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

“Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.”