James Joyce

"Our bites are sharp and we have many teeth."

"Only God can make a tree, but only man can create beauty from the materials God provides."

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

"I have become my own ancestor."

"The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

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

"The difficulty is that I am mad about writing, but I am a coward about living."

"He who makes no mistakes knows nothing. I have nothing to declare except my genius."

"When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of that world is a form of your freedom."

"I've more or less got the measure of this world. It's a very unsatisfactory arrangement."

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives."

"Do you know what Ireland is? Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."

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

"He fell in love with the idea of love itself, not the person before him."

"Art should surprise people; it should not comfort them."

"The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."

"I would like to do for humans what Copernicus did for the universe."

"One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cut and dry grammar and goahead plot."

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

"The true and acceptable way into the divine consists in mercy and understanding."

"The more you have, the more you are occupied. The less you have, the more free you are."

"Chaos is a friend. He's an old friend. We must embrace him."

"His very hand that wrote it was not his own, nor his head which thought it."

"The beautiful Milly Bloom drew over her window shade."

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

"I'm not overdrawn in my mind. I'm not in debt. What does the word mean?"

"Her mind lives in a secret place which to no one can belong."

"The corruption, largely, of the island would come from one angle."

"Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven applies to the intellectual life."