Ulysses

From BillionQuotes

Ulysses (1922) is a novel by James Joyce, written in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris (1914-1921)

• The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

• It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.

• Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.

• I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

• History, said Stephen, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
  • often quoted simply as Stephen's statement: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

• Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: — That is God
  Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
  — What? Mr Deasy asked.
  — A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
  • sometimes quoted as: God is a shout in the street.

• —I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?
  

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

—Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

—Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air.

—She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That’s why.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

• —Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

• —Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.

• —You don't want anything for breakfast?
  

A sleepy soft grunt answered:

—Mn.

• Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

• Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.

• DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN

• Monsieur de la Palisse, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes before his death.

• Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship.

• Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.
  Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.
  — By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will.

• It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born

• Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery.

• If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.
  • A play on words relating to William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway.

• Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr. Sigerson says. We are becoming important, it seems.

• Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.

• As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.

• His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral.

• The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious

• You know Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon's blankets: William the conquerer came before Richard III.

• A father, said Stephen, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil.

• Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

• What the hell are you driving at?

• Are you condemned to do this?
  —They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.

• Tap. Tap. A stripling, blind, with a tapping cane came taptaptapping by Daly’s window where a mermaid hair all streaming (but he couldn’t see) blew whiffs of a mermaid (blind couldn’t), mermaid, coolest whiff of all.

• — But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
  — What? says Alf.
  — Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

• Love loves to love love.

• But oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

• He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

• O Jamesy let me up out of this

• I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
  • Last lines. This is a famous passage often known as "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy" and has been used as the basis for the song "The Sensual World" by Kate Bush, and another called "Yes" by the musical artist Amber.

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