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

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
Truth
Trying
Stephen
Nightmare
Awake
History

More quotes by James Joyce

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There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.
James Joyce
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Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.
James Joyce
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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?
James Joyce
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He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
James Joyce
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Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more. She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she?
James Joyce
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Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.
James Joyce
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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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You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.
James Joyce
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British Beatitudes! ... Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.
James Joyce
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He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.
James Joyce
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The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.
James Joyce
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Nations have their ego, just like individuals.
James Joyce
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I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
James Joyce
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His heart danced upon her movement like a cork upon a tide.
James Joyce
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I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.
James Joyce
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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.
James Joyce
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Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.
James Joyce
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Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.
James Joyce
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Love loves to love love.
James Joyce
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The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.
James Joyce