James Joyce

Ah star of evil! star of pain! Highhearted youth comes not again

Gnash The thirteen teeth Your lean jaws grin with. Lash Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.

The sly reeds whisper to the night A name — her name —

Seraphim, The lost hosts awaken

Vast wings above the lambent waters brood Of sullen day.

And mine a shielded heart for her Who gathers simples of the moon.

Around us fear, descending Darkness of fear above

The fragrant hair, Falling as through the silence falleth now Dusk of the air.

How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling, Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling, Then as now.

Frail the white rose and frail are Her hands that gave

Loveward above the glancing oar

Boor, bond of thy herd, Tonight stretch full by the fire! I bleed by the black stream For my torn bough!

(Of Shakespeare) A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery (243)

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. (683)

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

I know all about the honour of God, Mary Jane, but I think it's not at all honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have slaved there all their lives and put little whipper-snappers of boys over their heads. I …

And why couldn't he have a voice too? asked Freddy Malins sharply. Is it because he's only a black? Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there …

But there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from …

Everything in Paris is gay

He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give …