James Joyce Quotes

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

“All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.”

“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”

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

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

“Redheaded women buck like goats.”

“Shut your eyes and see.”

“The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

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

“Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”

“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.”

“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is, is another question.”

“You can still die when the sun is shining.”

“And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

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

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”

“The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.”

“There's no friends like the old friends.”

“First we feel. Then we fall.”

“They lived and laughed and loved and left.”

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

“As you are now so once were we.”

“Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.”

“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.”

“God made food; the devil the cooks.”

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.”

“Let my country die for me.”

“Love loves to love love.”