Quote

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.

James Joyce

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James Joyce
Age: 58 †
Born: 1882
Born: February 2
Died: 1941
Died: January 13
Author
Father
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Teacher
Writer
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
Existence
Refined
Within
Indifferent
Artist
Invisible
Art
Remains
Like
Behinds
Paring
Creation
Handiwork
Beyond
Refining
Behind
Fingernails

More quotes by James Joyce

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When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.
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To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.
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A nation is the same people living in the same place.
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In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.
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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.
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I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.
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Nations have their ego, just like individuals.
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What did it avail to pray when he knew his soul lusted after its own destruction?
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Too excited to be genuinely happy
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I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.
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Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another s soul.
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For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.
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Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.
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The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue.
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[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.
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British Beatitudes! ... Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.
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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.
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Never let us do wrong, because our opponents did so. Let us, rather, by doing right, show them what they ought to have done, and establish a rule the dictates of reason and conscience, rather than of the angry passions.
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I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.
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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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