A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Quotes

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real....”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:lovereality

“Welcome, O life, 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.”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:lifeexperience

“If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and wilful as a bird's heart?”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:lifesimplicity

“A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:lifeyouth

“The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the beginning of death.”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:death

“Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:time

“Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:timeeternity

“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...”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:freedombeliefsilence

“This race and this country and this life produced me . . . I shall express myself as I am.”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:self

“He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.”

― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

topic:heart