Quotations from James Joyce' Ulysses

  • 1 [Opening words] Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came down from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
  • 3 A new art colour for our Irish poets:snotgreen The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton.
  • 13 When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water. By Jove, it is tea, Haines said. Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling: So I do, Mrs Cargill, says she. Begob, ma'am, says Mrs Cahill, God send you don't make them in the one pot.
  • 18 Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty. [Parody on 'England expects'...
  • 42 History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
  • 43 To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.
  • 45 Ineluctable modality of the visible.
  • 65 Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
  • 69 Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.
  • 73 Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.
  • 95 Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot ...
  • 140 Out of the frying pan of life into the fire of purgatory.
  • 157 High falutin stuff.
  • 166 We havenÕt got the chance of a snowball in hell.
  • 167 Our old ancestors, as we read in the first chapter of Guinness's, ...
  • 169 I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind.
  • 174 Nightmare from which you will never awake.
  • 183 DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN
  • 192 Australians they must be this time of year.
  • 193 How can you own water really? It's always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace [a reference to Heraclitus?]
  • 195 It was a nun they say invented barbed wire
  • 219 God made food, the devil the cooks. Devilled crab. He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs.
  • 222 Oh the big doggy-bowwowsywowsy!
  • 222 Yes but what about oysters? Unsightly like a clot of phlegm.
  • 225 And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine.
  • 226 He's in the craft, he said [Freemasonry]
  • 233 In aid of funds for Mercer's hospital. The Messiah was first given for that. Yes Handel. [1992 was the 250th anniversary of the first performance]
  • 239 Our Father who art in purgatory.
  • 243 A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery [Reference to Joyce himself].
  • 244 If others have their will Ann hath a way [A terrible pun]
  • 246 Our national epic has yet to be written [Ulysses is probably now the Irish epic of which he spoke]
  • 248 Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned.
  • 253 [A fragment of music - Gloria in excelsis deo]
  • 265 A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil.
  • 320 Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
  • 353 Tenors get women by the score.
  • 356 Bravo! Clapclap. Goodman, Simon. Clappyclapclap. Encore! Clapclipclap.
  • 361 Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be. Wisdom while you wait.
  • 373 Messrs Pick and Pocket have power of attorney.
  • 386 Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightaway brought him a crystal cup of the foaming ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda.
  • 387 Victoria, her name, Her Most Excellent Majesty, by Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and Ireland