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Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

— James Joyce

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More quotes by James Joyce

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

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

Ulysses (1922)

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

James Clarence Mangan (1902)

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Joyce (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.