Book of Quotes

Ulysses

Ulysses by James Joyce

- "Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."

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

- "Love loves to love love."

- "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."

- "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

- "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."

- "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."

- "The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea."

- "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."

- "Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance."

- "The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring."

- "I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy."

- "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

- "God made food; the devil the cooks."

- "What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours."

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

- "As you are now so once were we."

- "Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past."

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

- "Let my country die for me."

- "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."

- "It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born."

- "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."