Ulysses (novel)

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air.”

“The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.”

“He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.”

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

“If you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Helenise it.”

“Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.”

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

“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.”

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

“Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: — A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.”

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

“— Mrkgnao! the cat said loudly. — Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.”

“— You don't want anything for breakfast? — Mn.”

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

“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.”

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

“Our national epic has yet to be written.”

“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 conqueror 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?”

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

“It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...”

“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. — Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.”

“Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me. — By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will.”

“And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.”

“Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go as he came.”

“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.”

“Absence makes the heart grow younger.”

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

“At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his God being a jew. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them up was a bite from a sheep.”

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

“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.”

“If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.”

“she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly”

“O Jamesy let me up out of this.”

“I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things”