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"I fear those big words which make us so unhappy."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses, ch. 2 of 1984 edition (1922). |
"It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses, ch. 1 of 1984 edition (1922).
Referring to Buck Mulligan's purloined mirror. |
"By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Hero, episode 25, New Directions (1944).
The passage refers to Stephen Daedalus of Joyce's unfinished manuscript, Stephen Hero. Less than half the manuscript exists, and it was published only after Joyce's death. |
"Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Hero, episode 26, New Directions (1944).
Stephen Daedalus is the speaker in this passage from Joyce's unfinished manuscript, Stephen Hero. Less than half the manuscript exists, and it was published only after Joyce's death. |
"The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, and impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Hero, episode 19, New Directions (1944).
Stephen Daedalus is the speaker in this passage from Joyce's unfinished manuscript. Less than half the manuscript exists, and it was published only after Joyce's death. |
"A Classical style, he said, is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Hero, episode 19, New Directions (1944).
The passage refers to Stephen Daedalus of Joyce's unfinished manuscript, Stephen Hero. Less than half the manuscript exists, and it was published only after Joyce's death. |
"It was not only in Skeat that he found words for his treasure- house, he found them also at haphazard in the shops, on advertisements, in the mouths of the plodding public. He kept repeating them to himself till they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Hero, episode 5, New Directions (1944).
The passage refers to Stephen Daedalus of Joyce's unfinished first attempt at an autobiographical novel. Less than half the manuscript exists, and it was published only after Joyce's death. Skeat refers to Skeat's Etymological Dictionary. |
"The artist, he imagined, standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams—"a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty." To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success: the artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and "re-embody" it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Hero, episode 19, New Directions (1944).
The passage refers to Stephen Daedalus of Joyce's unfinished manuscript, Stephen Hero. Less than half the manuscript exists, and it was published only after Joyce's death. |
"—The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. "The Dead," Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes, Viking (1968).
Lily, the caretaker at the Mrs. Morkans', makes her well- known response to Gabriel Conroy's question about her marriage prospects in Dublin. |
"The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. 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."
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. "The Dead," Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes, Viking (1968).
The heightened and lyric style of the famous conclusion of "The Dead" makes it difficult to gauge the narrator's attitude toward Gabriel Conroy's elegiac reverie. |
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