Ulysses
Published:
- “Thought is the thought of thought.”
- “I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life.”
- “Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancors (longstanding bitterness) massed about them and knew their zeal was in vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time would surely scatter all. A hoard heaped on the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.”
- On the wealthy stock traders.
- “On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.”
- “Unwholesome sandflats waited to such his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in sea fire under a midden of man’s ashes.”
- “Darkness is in our souls, do you not think? Flutier. Our souls shame wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more and more.”
- On cats: “They understand what we say better than we understand them. [The cat] understands all she wants to.”
- “I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”
- On the priest who conducts funeral services: “Said he was going to paradise or is in paradise. Says that over everybody. Tiresome kind of a job. But he has to say something.”
- Something must be said, better to make it pleasant.
- “Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses nothing. Immortelles.”
- “Nature abhors a vacuum.”
- “Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”
- “‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.’”
- “Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies.”
- “Course everything is dear if you don’t want it. That’s what good salesman is. Make you buy what he wants to sell.”
- “Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” — Thomas Gray
- “[She] broke out into a joyous little laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May morning.”
- “Love laughs at locksmiths.”
- “[Perfume/woman’s scent] is like a fine veil or we. They have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer, and they’re always spinning it out of them, fine as anything, like rainbow colours without knowing it.”
- “The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls of wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial of dew stars.”
- “How serene does she now arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold and coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer. It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad of metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangles sign upon the forehead of Taurus.”
- “The Soap: We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I. He brightens the earth. I polish the sky.”
- Haha
- “My methods are new and are causing surprise / To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes.”
- “Dwarfs ride them, rustyarmoured, leaping, leaping in their, in their saddles.”
- “People could put up being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles. Your god was a jew.”