Ulysses Quotes

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!”
― Tennyson, Alfred

“In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“We can't change the world, but we can change the subject”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.”
― James Joyce

“And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I, too, like to read. Once a month, I go to the local branch. For myself, I pick a novel and, for Bruno, with his cataracts, a book on tape. At first Bruno was doubtful. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he said, looking at the box set of “Anna Karenina” as if I’d handed him an enema. And yet. A day or two later I was going about my business when a voice from above bellowed, ALL HAPPY FAMILIES RESEMBLE ONE ANOTHER, nearly giving me a conniption. After that, he listened to whatever I’d brought him at top volume and then returned it to me without comment. One afternoon, I came back from the library with Ulysses. For a month straight he listened. He had a habit of pressing the stop button and rewinding when he hadn’t fully grasped something. INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT. Pause, rewind. INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE. Pause, rewind. INELUCTABLE MODALITY. Pause. INELUCT.”
― Nicole Krauss

“Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“This [Ulysses] is obviously the wave of the future, I'm glad I'm dying of tuberculosis.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that, whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”
― John Munro Woolsey, United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses"

“In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.”
― John Munro Woolsey, United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses"

“Disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Taking a little more than is good for him. Absinthe, the greeneyed monster. I know him. He’s a gentleman, a poet. It’s alright.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.”
― James Joyce

“Dogs, did you think that I should not come back from Troy? You have wasted my substance, have forced my women servants to lie with you, and have wooed my wife while I was still living. You have feared neither God nor man, and now you shall die.”
― Homer, Homer: The Odessey

“Inside it Scylla sits and yelps with a voice that you might take to be that of a young hound, but in truth she is a dreadful monster and no one—not even a god—could face her without being terror-struck. She has twelve mis-shapen feet, and six necks of the most prodigious length; and at the end of each neck she has a frightful head with three rows of teeth in each, all set very close together, so that they would crunch any one to death in a moment, and she sits deep within her shady cell thrusting out her heads and peering all round the rock, fishing for dolphins or dogfish or any larger monster that she can catch, of the thousands with which Amphitrite teems. No ship ever yet got past her without losing some men, for she shoots out all her heads at once, and carries off a man in each mouth.”
― Homer, Homer: The Odessey

“Man is the vainest of all creatures that have their being upon earth. As long as heaven vouchsafes him health and strength, he thinks that he shall come to no harm hereafter, and even when the blessed gods bring sorrow upon him, he bears it as he needs must, and makes the best of it; for God almighty gives men their daily minds day by day.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Then we entered the Straits in great fear of mind, for on the one hand was Scylla, and on the other dread Charybdis kept sucking up the salt water. As she vomited it up, it was like the water in a cauldron when it is boiling over upon a great fire, and the spray reached the top of the rocks on either side. When she began to suck again, we could see the water all inside whirling round and round, and it made a deafening sound as it broke against the rocks. We could see the bottom of the whirlpool all black with sand and mud, and the men were at their wits ends for fear. While we were taken up with this, and were expecting each moment to be our last, Scylla pounced down suddenly upon us and snatched up my six best men. I was looking at once after both ship and men, and in a moment I saw their hands and feet ever so high above me, struggling in the air as Scylla was carrying them off, and I heard them call out my name in one last despairing cry. As a fisherman, seated, spear in hand, upon some jutting rock throws bait into the water to deceive the poor little fishes, and spears them with the ox’s horn with which his spear is shod, throwing them gasping on to the land as he catches them one by one—even so did Scylla land these panting creatures on her rock and munch them up at the mouth of her den, while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony. This was the most sickening sight that I saw throughout all my voyages.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“We did not get on much further, for in another moment we were caught by a terrific squall from the West that snapped the forestays of the mast so that it fell aft, while all the ship’s gear tumbled about at the bottom of the vessel. The mast fell upon the head of the helmsman in the ship’s stern, so that the bones of his head were crushed to pieces, and he fell overboard as though he were diving, with no more life left in him. “Then Jove let fly with his thunderbolts, and the ship went round and round, and was filled with fire and brimstone as the lightning struck it. The men all fell into the sea; they were carried about in the water round the ship, looking like so many sea-gulls, but the god presently deprived them of all chance of getting home again.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“It is only by imposing a naïve and unexamined aesthetic of their own, [Tzvetan] Todorov proposes, that modern scholars are able to declare so confidently that certain parts of the ancient text could not belong with others: the supposedly primitive narrative is subjected by scholars to tacit laws like the law of stylistic unity, of noncontradiction, of nondigression, of nonrepetition, and by these dim but purportedly universal lights is found to be composite, deficient, or incoherent. If just these four laws were applied respectively to Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, Tristram Shandy, and Jealousy, each of these novels would have to be relegated to the dustbin of shoddily “redacted” literary scraps.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“Cosmic Voyager by Stewart Stafford

I was the new Ulysses,
Petals on a tide of darkness,
Cast to bloom among the stars,
Wilted, off the world's edge.

Lieutenant General Tommy P.,
Name, rank and serial oblivion,
My wife and hurricanes called me,
Memories of love kept me going.

I found myself fading adrift,
Dying far beyond the reach,
Of human hands and hearts,
In withering away, I found all.

They threw flags of all nations,
To reel in a drowning person;
One last breath for man,
One lungful of air for Mankind.

Falling from a height too high,
Never landing when I should,
Tumbling endlessly beyond nausea,
To an ethereally crowded firmament.

As water swirls down a plughole,
I touched the edges of existence,
And found the meaning of life,
In silent rocks of an alien planet.

In the speckled starling womb profound,
Self-love filled the void around.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson (Author)

“I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson