A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
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.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
Redheaded women buck like goats.
For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.
Life is too short to read a bad book.
But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
They lived and laughed and loved and left.
To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.
Men are governed by lines of intellect – women: by curves of emotion.
We are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.
The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.
You get a decent do at the Brazen Head.
I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.