“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“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.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“God made food; the devil the cooks.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“Let my country die for me.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“As you are now so once were we.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.’ Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
“INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.
Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.
Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”
― James Joyce, quote from Ulysses
James Joyce
Born place: in Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland
Born date February 2, 1882
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“Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
“Rejoice, Micayon. Yours is a prophet’s dream. The Great Nostalgia has made your world too small, and made you a stranger in that world. It has unloosed your imagination from the grip of
the despotic senses; and imagination has brought you forth your Faith.
And Faith shall lift you high above the stagnant, stifling world and carry you across the dreary emptiness and up the Rugged Mountains where every faith must needs be tried and purified of
the last dregs of Doubt.
And Faith so purified and triumphant shall lead you to the boundaries of the eternally green summit and there deliver you into the hands of Understanding.
Having discharged its task, Faith shall retire, and Understanding shall guide your steps to the unutterable Freedom of the
Summit which is the true, the boundless, and all-including home of God and the Overcoming
Man.”
― Mikhail Naimy, quote from The Book of Mirdad: The Strange Story of a Monastery Which Was Once Called the Ark
“The tears came into Christiana’s eyes,”
― quote from Little Pilgrim's Progress: From John Bunyan's Classic
“Propaganda is as powerful as heroin; it surreptitiously dissolves all capacity to think.”
― Gil Courtemanche, quote from A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
“He is well satisfied with his accommodation, which provides all modern amenities in a compact and convenient form, and leaves him the maximum amount of time free for his work. How much time people waste in walking from one room to another.... Space is time.”
― David Lodge, quote from Small World
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Notes from a Small I...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
