807 Quotes by James Joyce

A poet, yes, but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth? The seas’ ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating. – That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets. – Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That’s not English. A French Celt said that.

The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton – Parnell – never a man.

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.

All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: “O love! O love!” many times.

The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside.

Reproduction is the beginning of death.

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can’t understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn’t he have some spark of manhood about him?