“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 revery, he had hear...”
Work
"Joyce dissolved mechanism in literature as effectively as Einstein destroyed it in physics," wrote Alfred Kazin. "He showed that the material of fiction could rest upon as tense a distribution and as delicate a balance of its parts as any poem. Joyce's passion for form, in fact, is the secret of his progress as a novelist. He sought to bring the largest possible quantity of human life under the discipline of the observing mind, and the mark of his success is that he gave an epic form to what remains invisible to most novelists...Joyce means many things to different people; for me his importance has always been primarily a moral one. He was perhaps, the last man in Europe who wrote as if art were worth a human life...By living for his art he may yet have given others a belief in art worth living for."
Quotes
Showing 1-6 of 6
James Joyce
Canonical work source
“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 revery, he had hear...”
“God and religion before every thing!' Dante cried. 'God and religion before the world.' Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash. 'Very well then,' he...”
“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am...”
“And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart s...”
“The soul ... has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You...”
“God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.”