Ulysses Quotes

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Love loves to love love.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“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, Ulysses

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Let my country die for me.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“God made food; the devil the cooks.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“As you are now so once were we.”
― James Joyce, 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.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.’ Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs VErschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“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, Ulysses

“What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Me. And me now.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses