James Joyce

“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.”

“Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”

“Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.”

“The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.”

“Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.”

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”

“My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.”

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

“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?”

“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 and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”

“Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”

“The eyes, too, were reptilelike in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shriveled soul, poignant and selfembittered.”

“Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.”

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”

“The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart.”

“חלק גדול מאוד מהקיום של כל בן־אנוש עובר עליו במצב שלא ניתן למוסרו ברגישות מספקת באמצעות לשון בהירה, דקדוק שגור ועלילה זורמת.”

“איש אינו נותן לדורו שירות חשוב יותר ממי שמעניק לו את מתנת אי הוודאות.”

“לעתים קרובות, האישה היא נקודתו החלשה של בעלה.”

“השגיאות מהוות את שעריהן של התגליות.”