James Joyce Quotes - Page 2

Deal with him, Hemingway!

To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?...To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own.

To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand - that is art.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

What dreams would he have, not seeing. Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born that way?

Non servirò ciò in cui non credo più, si chiami questo la casa, la patria o la Chiesa: e tenterò di esprimere me stesso in un qualunque modo di vita o di arte quanto più potrò liberamente e integralmente, adoperando per difendermi le sole armi che mi concedo di usare: il silenzio, l'esilio e l'astuzia.

(...) The new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Specch, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.

And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.

Never back a woman you defend, never get quit of a friend on whom you depend, never make face to a foe till he’s rife and never get stuck to another man’s pfife.

Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.

You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think?

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

You don't know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put money in thy purse.

If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door.

A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winning post, his mane moonflowing, his eyeballs stars.

For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.