"Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America."

"Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it."

"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."

"He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place."

"The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

"There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present."

"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works."

"When I die Dublin will be written in my heart."

"I've a thirst on me I wouldn't sell for half a crown.- Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.- Wine of the country, says he.- What's yours? says Joe.- Ditto MacAnaspey, says I.- Three pints, Terry, says Joe. And how's the old heart, citizen? says he."

"He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music."

"Look at the woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost."

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

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

"He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life's feast."

"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light."

"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."

"For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints."

"Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand."

"I fear those big words which make us so unhappy."

"Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghost-woman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will."

"One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

"The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language."

"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not."

"A man's errors are his portals of discovery."

"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts."

"There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?"

"You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too."

"Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history."

"The eyes, too, were reptilelike in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shriveled soul, poignant and selfembittered."

"Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character."

"A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives."

"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."

"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality."

"The artist like the God of the creation remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork invisible refined out of existence indifferent paring his fingernails."

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRODI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see."

"And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades."

"If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European."

"Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound."

"Every life is 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."

"My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire."

"And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes."

"A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winning post, his mane moonflowing, his eyeballs stars."

"To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic."

"Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?-I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?"

"What was after the universe?Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?"

"Ireland sober is Ireland stiff."

"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."

"Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well."

"Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse."

"Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.-I will take the risk, said Stephen.-And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had."