James Joyce

Ireland
2 Feb 1882 // 13 Jan 1941
Writer

Quotes

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

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
First we feel. Then we fall.

Finnegans Wake
I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

Dubliners
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.

Dubliners
There's no friends like the old friends.

Dubliners
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.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Ulysses
To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

Ulysses
The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.

Ulysses
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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