"People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus."
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Quote collection
James Joyce quotes (page 1 of 17)
323 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Shut your eyes and see."
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"Absence, the highest form of presence."
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"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
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"There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present."
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"Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it."
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"The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring."
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"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."
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"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."
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"All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday."
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"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."
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"Fall if you will, but rise you must."
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"The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."
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"Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor."
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"Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead."
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"He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music."
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"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
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"One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot."
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"When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street."
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"The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously"
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