807 Quotes by James Joyce

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description.

Will ye, ay or nay?

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand.

Then I went to a certain nightclub. There were men there – and also women. At least, they looked like women.

The ree the ra the ree the ra the roo. Lord, I mustn’t lilt here.

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life. A wild angel appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast.

I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse.

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? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry.