Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

“Shut your eyes and see.”

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

“And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”

“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.”

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

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”

“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.”

“Love loves to love love.”

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

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”

“Every life is in 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.”

“They lived and laughed and loved and left.”

“All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.”

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

“But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

“Life is too short to read a bad book.”

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”

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

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”

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

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

“Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.”

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

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

“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”

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

“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”

“First we feel. Then we fall.”

“Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.”

“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

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

“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”

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

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

“Too excited to be genuinely happy”

“You can still die when the sun is shining.”

“God made food; the devil the cooks.”

“To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.”

“I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.”

“Let my country die for me.”

“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?”

“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

“What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.”

“Have read little and understood less.”

“When a man is born...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.”

“As you are now so once were we.”

“The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.”

“My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.”