Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. 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.
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A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am. Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful. My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for? For our freedom, said Davin. No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first. They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me. Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant... When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets ... Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
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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.
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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...
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Night, Night. Tellmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of hitherandthithering waters of the Night!
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Amen. So be it. 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 ...
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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 fallin...
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Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.
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When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.
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The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of ex...
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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.
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Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
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When I heard the word stream uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.
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He winged away on a wildgoup's chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit's wa...
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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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No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
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Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
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O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea and the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda g...
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Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins commited in previous lives.
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History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
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History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.
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While you have a thing it can be taken from you... but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.
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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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The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.
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Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
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A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
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Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
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Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
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I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's mortality.
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I call that a scumhead.
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