Daily Digest

“Shut your eyes and see.”

“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

“When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.”

“Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”

“Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.”

“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 heard their tale before.”

“Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.”

“All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.”

“and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.”

“God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.”

“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

“No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.”

“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”

“Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”

“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”

“My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.”

“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.”

“A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.”

“He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.”

“I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”

“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 shouted hoarsely, 'if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!' 'John! John!' cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve. Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb. 'No God for Ireland!' he cried, 'We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!”

“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”

“Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.”

“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 not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.”

“My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.”

“If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.”

“There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.”

“I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.”

“Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.”

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.”

“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.”

“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 simple and willful as a bird's heart?”

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”

“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 talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

“It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.”

“You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.”

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”

“God spoke to you by so many voices but you would not hear.”

“The artist, like the God of 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.”

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

“Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.”

“I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.”