A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Quotes

“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

“Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.”

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

topic:heart

“It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.”

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

topic:religionbelief

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”

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

topic:wordsmusiclanguage

“The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.”

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

topic:futurepastpresent

“To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a...”

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

topic:society

“He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.”

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

topic:readingpoetry

“I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.”

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

topic:loneliness

“Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.”

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

topic:desire

“The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart.”

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

topic:peace