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James Joyce

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

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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."

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Amber Hurdle

"Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost."

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Amber Hurdle

"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."

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Amber Hurdle

"Whatever you're ready for is ready for you."

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Amber Hurdle

"A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect."

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Amber Hurdle

"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."

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Amber Hurdle

"Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong."

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Amber Hurdle

"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."

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Amber Hurdle

"It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."

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Amber Hurdle

"Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect."

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Amber Hurdle

"She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me."

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James Joyce
"I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction."
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James Joyce
"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
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James Joyce
"You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use- silence, exile, and cunning."
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James Joyce
"He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music."
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James Joyce
"I fear those big words which make us so unhappy."
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James Joyce
"He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed him."
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James Joyce
"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts."
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James Joyce
"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not."
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James Joyce
"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."
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James Joyce
"Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatesoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer."
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