807 Quotes by James Joyce

With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never do.

I don’t mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father’s house? MTo seek misfortune, was Stephen’s answer.

So he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.

What? Corpus. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupifies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don’t seem to chew it; only swallow it down.

I am the fire upon the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.

I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as now was be past yester.

The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions.