Finnegans wake Quote by James Joyce

“Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.”

James Joyce

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More by James Joyce

He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.

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“Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody's body.”

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Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many…

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Shaw's works make me admire the magnificent tolerance and broadmindedness of the english.

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“Do you know what Ireland is?' asked Stephen with cold violence. 'Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”

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The studious silence of the library ... Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness.

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“two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither…

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He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington but in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy…

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“-Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?”

James Joyce

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I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.

James Joyce

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Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

James Joyce

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In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not…

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More Finnegans wake quotes

“On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the…

Samuel Beckett

“My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may — need is the word I use — to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second…

Roger Ebert

The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.

Dennis Miller

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For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every…

Philip Kitcher

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I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as…

Sylvia Beach

“I later spent a year studying Finnegans Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would never have undertaken—and he…

William Finnegan

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I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

Leslie Fiedler

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Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded…

Toni Morrison

“I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our own time, to concentrate on Sartre. His hesitations, retractations, inconsistencies, all proceed from his consciousness of the problems: how do novelistic differ from existential fictions? How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped…

Frank Kermode

The first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable.

Seamus Deane

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“In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one…

Murray Gell-Mann