War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.
Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.
It’s always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
You can’t beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don’t even try to.
When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there’s no holding me.
It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible. Terrible.
Love doesn’t die; the men and women do.
You don’t dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.
Who gathers the withered rose?
Idleness breeds our better virtues.
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice...
We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.
Let the past abolish the past when – and if – it can substitute something better.
The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is; I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.