Quote

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

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
Work
Thoughts
Monotonous
Life
Serious
Wandering
Child
Stood
Call
Wander
Desire
Hardly
Together
Patience
Play
Seemed
Children
Ugly

More quotes by James Joyce

Image
Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
James Joyce
Image
The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue.
James Joyce
Image
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.
James Joyce
Image
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
James Joyce
Image
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.
James Joyce
Image
People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.
James Joyce
Image
The artist... standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams - 'a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty.' To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success.
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
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.
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
Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.
James Joyce
Image
Let my country die for me.
James Joyce
Image
And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history.
James Joyce
Image
O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.
James Joyce
Image
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.
James Joyce
Image
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.
James Joyce
Image
It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.
James Joyce
Image
Gentle lady, do not sing Sad songs about the end of love Lay aside sadness and sing How love that passes is enough. Sing about the long deep sleep Of lovers that are dead, and how In the grave all love shall sleep: Love is aweary now.
James Joyce
Image
When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
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