I had been curiously depressed all day. In the night I wakened. First precise thought: I know why I'm depressed--nothing inspired ...is going on. Second: I demand that life be inspired every moment. Third: the only way to guarantee this is to have inspired conversation every moment. Fourth: most people never get so far as conversation; they haven't the stamina, and there is no time. Fifth: if I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer. Sixth: marvelous idea--salvation. Seventh: decision to do it. Deep sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual: the position of the genitals--inter urinas et faec...es--remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: "Anatomy is destiny."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
--I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart. --It does, Mr Bloom said.... Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Miss Dudley ... gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid- ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is d...oing there. She sails gaily along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming. She never read a book, I believe, in her life. She tries to paint, but she is only a second-rate amateur and will never be any thing more, though she has done one or two things which I give you my word I would like to have done myself. She picks up all she knows without an effort and knows nothing well, yet she seems to understand whatever is said. Her mind is as irregular as her face, and both have the same peculiarity. I notice that the lines of her eyebrows, nose and mouth all end with a slight upward curve like a yacht's sails, which gives a kind of hopefulness and self-confidence to her expression. Mind and face have the same curves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since I am upon this Subject, I must observe that our English Poets have succeeded much better in the Stile, than in the Sentiment...s of their Tragedies. Their Language is very often noble and sonorous, but the sense either very trifling or very common. On the contrary, in the ancient Tragedies, and indeed in those of Corneille and Racine, tho' the Expressions are very great, it is the Thought that bears them up and swells them. For my own part, I prefer a noble Sentiment that is depressed with homely Language, infinitely before a vulgar one that is blown up with all the Sound and Energy of Expression. Whether this Defect in our Tragedies may arise from Want of Genius, Knowledge, or Experience in the Writers, or from their Compliance with the vicious Taste of their Readers, who are better Judges of the Language than of the Sentiments, and consequently relish the one more than the other, I cannot determine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is to be done with people who can't read a Sunday paper without messing it all up?... Show me a Sunday paper which has been l...eft in a condition fit only for kite flying, and I will show you an antisocial and dangerous character who has left it that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was not at all shocked with this execution at the time. John died seemingly without much pain. He was effectually hanged, the ro...pe having fixed upon his neck very firmly, and he was allowed to hang near three quarters of an hour; so that any attempt to recover him would have been in vain. I comforted myself in thinking that by giving up the scheme I had avoided much anxiety and uneasiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ask you to join in a re-United States. We need to empower our people so they can take more responsibility for their own lives in... a world that is ever smaller, where everyone counts.... We need a new spirit of community, a sense that we are all in this together, or the American Dream will continue to wither. Our destiny is bound up with the destiny of every other American.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and ...nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do you know, I've never really grown up? It's a hard thing for me to play this game. In politics, one must meet people, and that's... not easy for me.... When I was a little fellow, as long ago as I can remember, I would go into a panic if I heard stranger voices in the house. I felt I just couldn't meet the people and shake hands with them. Most of the visitors would sit with Mother and Father in the kitchen and the hardest thing in the world was to go through the door and give them a greeting.... I'm all right with old friends, but every time I meet a stranger, I've got to go through the old kitchen door, back home, and it's not easy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »