Orientations:
"Each of my books is a book about Dublin. Dublin is a city of scarcely three hundred thousand population, but it has become the universal city of my work" (Joyce in conversation with a Czech friend, Adolf Hoffmeister).
"Toun of Morning de Heights with his lavast flow and his rambling undergroands" (Finnegans Wake, p. 481)
"morningrise was encampassed" (Finnegans Wake, p. 543).
An Adventure with words:
"Certainly any intelligent reader can read and understand it, if he returns to the text again and again. He is setting out on an adventure with words" (Joyce of Ulysses to Hoffmeister).
"Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him" (Portrait of the Artist, p. 64).
"It was not only in Skeat that he found words for his treasure house, he found them also haphazardly in the shops, on advertisements, in the mouths of the plodding public. He kept repeating them to himself till they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables" (Stephen Hero, p. 30).
"Every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own" (Finnegans Wake, p.15).
"Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt." (Ulysses, 7: 174-77).
"I "an"t, "an, he answered, "y "onge is hurt" (Dubliners, "Grace," p.153).
"You hald him by the tap of the tang" (Finnegans Wake, p. 598).
"Plasto"s high grade ha" (Ulysses, 4: 69).
"Listen: a fourworded
wavesppech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes,
rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded
in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing,
floating, foampool,flower unfurling"
(Ulysses, 3: 456-460).
"Oot: a dullgarbed
old man from the curbstone tended his wares, his mouth opening: oot."
—Four bootlaces for a penny. (Ulysses, 6: 229-31)
"Welts of flesh behind on him. Fat folds of neck, fat, neck, fat, neck" (Ulysses, 7: 48).
"Her wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:"d" (Ulysses, 11: 808-09).
"Up with her on the car: wishwish" (Ulysses, 8: 347-48).
SHAKESEPARE
Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun. Iagogogo! (Ulysses, 15: 3828-29)
"A.E.I.O.U." (Ulysses, 9: 213-13)
"Ha he hi ho hu" (Finnegans Wake, 259).
"Acomedy of Letters" (Finnegans Wake, p. 425).
Artist in Exile (the Odyssean Plot)
"When the soul of a 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" (Portrait of the Artist, p 220).
"There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a sundering" (Ulysses, 9: 397-98).
"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call 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 defence the only arms I allow myself to use"silence, exile, and cunning" (Portrait of the Artist, p. 269).
"Hush! Caution! Echoland!" (Finnegans Wake, p. 13).
"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" (Portrait of the Artist, p. 276).
"Self-exiled in upon his own ego" (Finnegans Wake, p. 184).
"A poor trait of the artless" (Finnegans Wake, p. 114).
"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" (Finnegans Wake, p. 171).
"What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself? God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self" (Ulysses, 15: 2171-19).
"Think you"re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way around is the shortest way home" (Ulysses, 13: 1110-11).
"The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which . . . [Is] the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave" (Ulysses, 15: 2105-2112).
"His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience" (Ulysses, 9: 432-33).
"Was liffe worth leaving?" (Finnegans Wake, p. 230).
"Landescape" (Finnegans Wake, p. 53).
"So this is Dyoublong?" (Finnegans Wake, p. 13).
"Ireland must be important because it belongs to me" (Ulysses, 16: 1164-65).
Artist as Priest: The Vocational Mission
"Don"t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift." (Joyce conversation with his brother, Stanislaus).
"Altar"s Ego" (Finnegans Wake, p. 463).
"To him she would unveil her soul"s shy nakedness, to one who was but schooled in the discharging of a formal rite rather than to him, a priest of eternal imagination" (Portrait of the Artist, p. 240).
"Let us pry" (Finnegans Wake, p. 188).
"joysis crisis" (Finnegans Wake, p. 395).
"He was seized and bound like a common criminal, mocked at as a fool, set aside to give place to a public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes crowned with a crown of thorns, hustled through the streets by the jewish rabble and the Roman soldiery, stripped of His garments and hanged upon a gibbet and His side was pierced with a lance and from the wounded body of Our Lord water and blood issued continually" (Portrait, p. 128).
He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between
Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like a bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already" (Ulysses, 9: 493-99).
"They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid" (Ulysses, 12: 1354-59).