79 quotes
Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
Though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.
He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul.
Dubliners (1914)
I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
Dubliners (1914)
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.
Richard Ellmann (1983)
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?
Stephen Hero (1944)
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Dubliners (1914)
She dealt with moral problems the way a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind.
Dubliners (1914)
Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship.
Ulysses (1922)
I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.
Every night as I gazed up at the window I said to myself softly the word paralysis.
Dubliners (1914)
The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.
Stephen Hero (1944)
But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
Dubliners (1914)
Around us fear, descending
Darkness of fear above
Pomes Penyeach (1927)
And why couldn't he have a voice too? asked Freddy Malins sharply. Is it because he's only a black? Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera.
Dubliners (1914)
Boor, bond of thy herd,
Tonight stretch full by the fire!
I bleed by the black stream
For my torn bough!
Pomes Penyeach (1927)
Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Pomes Penyeach (1927)
A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place, Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword? A Successful Career in the Civil Service.
Finnegans Wake (1939)