Finnegans Wake Quotes

• I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Funny, Thinking, Patterns

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• One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

  James Joyce

  Plot, Use, Language

  James Joyce (2016). “The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more”, p.3187, e-artnow

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• In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

  James Joyce

  Running, Names

  James Joyce (2016). “Finnegans Wake”, p.91, James Joyce

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• They lived and laughed and loved and left.

  James Joyce

  Love, Life, Positive Thinking

  James Joyce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)”, p.849, Delphi Classics

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• 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

  Life, Reality, Race

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ch. 5 (1916)

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• A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

  James Joyce

  Past, Long, Castles

  James Joyce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)”, p.835, Delphi Classics

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• Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.

  James Joyce

  Art, Laughter, Misery

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• So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.

  James Joyce

  Book, Reading, Dublin

  James Joyce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)”, p.851, Delphi Classics

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• Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish.

  James Joyce

  Secular, Ifs

  "Finnegans Wake". Book by James Joyce, 1939.

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• I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as he explained to me, the meaning in Finnegans Wake is obscure because it is a 'nightpiece.' I think, too, that, like the author's sight, the work is often blurred.

  Sylvia Beach

  Thinking, Games, Sight

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• Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.

  Toni Morrison

  Fun, Block, Reading

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• I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.

  Umberto Eco

  Two, Language, Source

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• The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.

  Dennis Miller

  Reading, Tunnels, Wind

  Dennis Miller (2001). “I Rant, Therefore I Am”, p.173, Crown Forum

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• You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

  Philip Larkin

  Crazy, Odd, Ibsen

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• The first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable.

  Seamus Deane

  Important, Firsts

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• My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may - need is the word I use - to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed.

  Roger Ebert

  War, Book, One Day

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• Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the good life". I hope to examine both of them further, doing more justice to Joycean comedy than I did in my "invitation" to the Wake, and trying to understand how the extraordinary stylistic innovations, particularly the proliferation of narrative forms, enable Joyce to "see life foully" from a vast number of sides.

  Philip Kitcher

  Good Life, Philosophical, Numbers

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it has three score and ten "toptypsical" meanings - an exaggeration, of course, but an important reminder to readers who like their fiction definite.

  Philip Kitcher

  Perspective, Important, Three

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Sleep, Idols, Tower Of Babel

  Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, Dominique Scheffel-Dunand (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p.208, University of Toronto Press

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• I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business.

  Helen DeWitt

  School, Age, Proust

  Helen DeWitt (2016). “The Last Samurai”, p.61, New Directions Publishing

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