807 Quotes by James Joyce

I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play.

There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy.

His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk.

More mud, more crocodiles.

Reefer was a wenchman.

But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.

Even if we are often led to desire through the sense of beauty can you say that the beautiful is what we desire?