Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Would
Whether
Harps
Like
Upon
Adoration
Words
Wire
Speak
Spokes
Running
Gestures
Tell
Spoke
Body
Confused
Wires
Ever
Fingers
Harp

More quotes by James Joyce

Image
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.
James Joyce
Image
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
Image
Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
James Joyce
Image
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.
James Joyce
Image
[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.
James Joyce
Image
Nations have their ego, just like individuals.
James Joyce
Image
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
Image
Love, yes. Word known to all men.
James Joyce
Image
Fall if you will, but rise you must.
James Joyce
Image
Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.
James Joyce
Image
Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are... Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead.
James Joyce
Image
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.
James Joyce
Image
It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.
James Joyce
Image
Quotation marks quotato marks! Bah!
James Joyce
Image
Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.
James Joyce
Image
O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?
James Joyce
Image
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.
James Joyce
Image
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: — That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! — What? Mr Deasy asked. — A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
James Joyce
Image
Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
James Joyce
Image
When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.
James Joyce