James Joyce

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

“By thinking of things you could understand them.”

“Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.”

“Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all.”

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRODI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”

“Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”

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

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

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

“When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.”

“Let my country die for me.”

“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.”

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

“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

“If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.”

“Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.”

“The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

“No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.”

“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 thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God.”

“He laughed to free his mind from his minds bondage.”