James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.
How hideous is the semicolon.
My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don’t understand how it can be endured.
The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.
Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.
Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.
Yes, light, there is no other word for it.
There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.
The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.
Women are all the bloody sameyou can’t love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.
Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away.
Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.
I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.
Art has always been this – pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric – whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.
An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.
That penny farthing hell you call your mind.
Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most.
My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.
I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.
The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.
Enough to know no knowing.