James Joyce Quotes

Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn't crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.'' -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.

All the trials we endure cannot be compared to these interior battles.

The mind scolds the heart, which makes excuses and goes its own way.

It’s all okay, it’s all beautiful; but ah fear that this internal sea is gaunnae subside soon, leaving this poisonous shite washed up, stranded up in ma body.

Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up! his mind demanded of him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation. Different segments of the organism called John Terrance Kelly knew different parts of the whole story, but somehow they'd never all come together, leaving the separate fragments of what had ...once been a tough, smart, decisive and to blunder about in confusion - and despair! There was a happy thought.

It's like an inner struggle for me, between saying I don't give a **** and trying to make it work. You want to do the right thing, but I'm sick of people thinking I'm difficult.

Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on.

All through the night, she battled herself. Or battled to know herself. She fell apart and then put herself back together and then she fell apart again and put herself back together, over and over.

The beast in me Is caged by frail and fragile bars.

Heavy, heavy-hearted people grow lighter and rise occasionally to their surface through precisely that which makes others heavier,through hatred and love.

I realized how truly hard it was, really, to see someone you love change right before your eyes. Not only is it scary, it throws your balance off as well.

I seek strength, not to be greater than other, but to fight my greatest enemy, the doubts within myself

Shame is the shadow of love.

In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the "external man." When the internal man has been reduced to silence, then passion, once it has been given freedom of action, so to speak, exhibits itself as an insistent tendency to satisfy the senses and the body.

I love him," I said, but even to my own ears I didn't sound happy about it.

I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires.

There's a constant contradiction between what feels good and what feels right. But you live with decisions that you make in your life.

He should be the one to die, part of me thinks. I don't want to lose him, another part argues. I don't know which part to believe.

I’ve been feeling something else. Like I’m about to be sucked into something powerful and painful.

I had to hold my head up high and put a bold face on things, but the thoughts keep coming anyways.

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.

I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I think about my life and how I ended up this way. I think about the ruin, devastation and wreckage I have caused to myself and to others. I think about self-hatred and self-loathing. I think about how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

She fell into the moody, miserable state of mind which often comes when strong wills have to yield to the inevitable.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.