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An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.

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
Comedy
Improper
Feeling
Aesthetics
Desire
Aims
Feelings
Proper
Art
Aim
Way
Comic
Exciting
Joy

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There's many a true word spoken in jest.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
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British Beatitudes! ... Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.
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History is that nightmare from which there is no awakening.
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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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Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.
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The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.
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Winds of May, that dance on the sea, Dancing a ring-around in glee From furrow to furrow, while overhead The foam flies up to be garlanded, In silvery arches spanning the air, Saw you my true love anywhere? Welladay! Welladay! For the winds of May! Love is unhappy when love is away!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.
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So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.
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His heart danced upon her movement like a cork upon a tide.
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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.
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O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.
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One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.
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