A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

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.

— James Joyce

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Furthermore, her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Furthermore, her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumage dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

— James Joyce

ah, yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they don't know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you, he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Both head in the gray tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcase out of my mouth, and it was leap year like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a women body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because Saw he understood or felt what a woman is, and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could lead him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn't answer first only looked out over these and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn't know of McLean Mr Stan hope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the Jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larry Sharon's and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the Poseidon glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wine shops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deep down torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little street sand the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and thejessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was 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 meander the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then asked him with my eyes to ask again yes, and then he asked me would Yes to say yes my mountain flower, and first I put my arms around him ye sand 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.

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

—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, Cranky said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.

— James Joyce

A man of genius makes no mistakes his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

— James Joyce

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

— James Joyce

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

— James Joyce