Ulysses Quotes

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!”
― Tennyson, Alfred

“In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.”
― James Joyce

“We can't change the world, but we can change the subject”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I, too, like to read. Once a month, I go to the local branch. For myself, I pick a novel and, for Bruno, with his cataracts, a book on tape. At first Bruno was doubtful. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he said, looking at the box set of “Anna Karenina” as if I’d handed him an enema. And yet. A day or two later I was going about my business when a voice from above bellowed, ALL HAPPY FAMILIES RESEMBLE ONE ANOTHER, nearly giving me a conniption. After that, he listened to whatever I’d brought him at top volume and then returned it to me without comment. One afternoon, I came back from the library with Ulysses. For a month straight he listened. He had a habit of pressing the stop button and rewinding when he hadn’t fully grasped something. INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT. Pause, rewind. INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE. Pause, rewind. INELUCTABLE MODALITY. Pause. INELUCT.”
― Nicole Krauss

“Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“This [Ulysses] is obviously the wave of the future, I'm glad I'm dying of tuberculosis.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that, whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”
― John Munro Woolsey, United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses"

“In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.”
― John Munro Woolsey, United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses"

“Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self.”
― James Joyce

“You die for your country... I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn’t want it to die. Damn death. Long live life.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,'" he's saying, bending over to gaze down into the deli case. His breath is fogging the glass. I'm watching it suddenly. Watching him. "'He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart-'"
"'Liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes,'" I say, and I'm sure I sound a little stunned. I'm not used to boys coming into the deli to quote some of my favorite modernist literature. Even I can't resist that. A boy like him, who, from the first moment, seems to love the things I love.”
― Phoebe North, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“In what state of rest or motion?

At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space.”
― James Joyce

“Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon the alter. I am the sacrificial butter.”
― James Joyce

“As true as I’m drinking this porter if he was at his last gasp he’d try to downface you that dying was living.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Taking a little more than is good for him. Absinthe, the greeneyed monster. I know him. He’s a gentleman, a poet. It’s alright.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.”
― James Joyce

“Certainly he had heard of Homer, and had indeed looked into Mr Pope’s version of his tale; but for aught he could make out, the fellow was no seaman. Admittedly Ulysses had no chronometer, and probably no sextant neither; but with no more than log, lead and lookout an officer-like commander would have found his way home from Troy a d—d sight quicker than that. Hanging about in port and philandering, that was what it amounted to, the vice of navies from the time of Noah to that of Nelson. And as for that tale of all his foremast-hands being turned into swine, so that he could not win his anchor or make sail, why, he might tell that to the Marines. Besides, he behaved like a very mere scrub to Queen Dido.”
― Patrick O'Brian, Treason's Harbour

“It is only by imposing a naïve and unexamined aesthetic of their own, [Tzvetan] Todorov proposes, that modern scholars are able to declare so confidently that certain parts of the ancient text could not belong with others: the supposedly primitive narrative is subjected by scholars to tacit laws like the law of stylistic unity, of noncontradiction, of nondigression, of nonrepetition, and by these dim but purportedly universal lights is found to be composite, deficient, or incoherent. If just these four laws were applied respectively to Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Tristram Shandy, and Jealousy, each of these novels would have to be relegated to the dustbin of shoddily “redacted” literary scraps.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“Cosmic Voyager by Stewart Stafford

I was the new Ulysses,
Petals on a tide of darkness,
Cast to bloom among the stars,
Wilted, off the world's edge.

Lieutenant General Tommy P.,
Name, rank and serial oblivion,
My wife and hurricanes called me,
Memories of love kept me going.

I found myself fading adrift,
Dying far beyond the reach,
Of human hands and hearts,
In withering away, I found all.

They threw flags of all nations,
To reel in a drowning person;
One last breath for man,
One lungful of air for Mankind.

Falling from a height too high,
Never landing when I should,
Tumbling endlessly beyond nausea,
To an ethereally crowded firmament.

As water swirls down a plughole,
I touched the edges of existence,
And found the meaning of life,
In silent rocks of an alien planet.

In the speckled starling womb profound,
Self-love filled the void around.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson (Author)