James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he utilized. Other well- known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
Be just before you are generous.
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
Does nobody understand? (Last words)
God made food; the devil the cooks.
I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
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 express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use- silence, exile and cunning.
If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. 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.
It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.
Life is too short to read a bad book.
My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.
People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.
Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.
She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.
Shut your eyes and see.
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor.
Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
Categories: James Joyce, Quotes of the day
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