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...

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

Here, and it goes on to appear now, she comes, a peacefugle, a parody’s bird, a peri potmother, a pringlpik in the ilandiskippy, with peewee and powwows in beggybaggy on her bickybacky and a flick flask fleckflinging its pixylighting pacts’ huemeramybows, picking here, pecking there, pussypussy plunderpussy.

and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghost-woman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will.

Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in per-son? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed intooure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho!...

The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue…

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

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

—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

La emoción trágica, efectivamente, es una cara que mira en dos direcciones: hacia el terror y hacia la piedad, y ambos son fases de ella. Habrás visto que uso la palabra paraliza. Quiero decir que la emoción trágica es estática. O más bien que la emoción dramática lo es. Los sentimientos excitados por un arte...

What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin line there all round everything.[…]It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did...

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me...

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

YesIsaidyesyesyesyesyes…YesIsaidyes! andagainyesyesyes — Molly Bloom

What was after the universe?Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

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.

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

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?

You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to...

Era estranho, outrossim, que ele sentisse um árido prazer em seguir até o fim as rígidas linhas da doutrina da Igreja e penetrasse em tétricos silêncios apenas para ouvir e sentir mais profundamente a sua própria condenação. A frase de São Tiago que diz que aquele peca contra um mandamento se torna culpado por todos...

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in the copious easy-chair beside the bed. He tried to bid his tongue speak that he might seem at ease, watching her as she undid her gown, noting the proud conscious movements of her perfumed head.As he stood silent in the...

—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt’s port under her bellyband.

—Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.—I will take the risk, said Stephen.—And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than...

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

I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.

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?

Gentle lady, do not sing Sad songs about the end of love;Lay aside sadness and sing How love that passes is enough.Sing about the long deep sleep Of lovers that are dead, and howIn the grave all love shall sleep: Love is aweary now.

White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails

Deal with him, Hemingway!

He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.

He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed him.

Redheaded women buck like goats.

God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.

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.

And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn’t probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

Look at the woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost.

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can...

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No it was not their colours: it was the poise and...

Mi hai fatto confessare le paure che sento. Ma ti dirò anche che cos’è che non mi fa paura. Non mi fa paura esser solo o venir sprezzato per un altro o lasciare tutto ciò che tocchi lasciare. E non mi fa paura commettere un errore, anche un grande errore, un errore che duri quanto...