''When the soul of 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.''
''Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.''
''The Irishman's house is his coffin.''
''There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.''
''No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.''
''Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.''
''Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.''
''You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.''
''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 pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.''
''Jewgreek is greekjew.''
''It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.''
''All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.''
''So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.''
''Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.''
''Nations have their ego, just like individuals.''
''If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.''
''First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that of years ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.''
''I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come.''
''My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.''
''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.''
''We are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter.''
''Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.''
''Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full fost sleep. Amain.''
''Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.''
''Do fish ever get seasick.''
''MUpon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato. MWhich of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his commonwealth?''
''Why the title Exiles? A nation exacts a penance from those who dared leave her payable on their return.''
''Desire, for hire, would tire a shire.''
''If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.''
''Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.''
''He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro and macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.''
''An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.''
''All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.''
''I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.''
''History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.''
''Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.''
''A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.''
''—The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.''
''A nation is the same people living in the same place.''
''I am not likely to die of bashfulness but neither am I prepared to be crucified to attest the perfection of my art. I dislike to hear of any stray heroics on the prowl for me.''
''Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.''
''When is a man not a man?... When he is a Myours till the rending of the rocks, MSham.''
''A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.''
''I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.''
''And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history....''
''I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.''
''Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.''
''He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.''
''His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.''
''Three quarks for Muster Mark!''
''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.... Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.''
''Love, yes. Word known to all men.''
''He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland's split little pea.''
''He winged away on a wildgoup's chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit's waste.''
''Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.''