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

— James Joyce

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

— 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.

— James Joyce

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or every, he had heard their tale before.

— James Joyce

His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of every to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.

— James Joyce

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

— James Joyce

I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.

— James Joyce

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

— James Joyce

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

— James Joyce

If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bog swamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horse dung and consumptives' spits.

— James Joyce