Ulysses Quotes

• How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Life, Shining, Age

  'Ulysses' (1842) l. 6

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• Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

  James Joyce

  Inspirational, Life, Running

  James Joyce, General Press (2016). “Ulysses”, p.329, GENERAL PRESS

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• Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Strong, Taken, Heart

  "Ulysses" l. 65 (1842)

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• And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Stars, Poetry, Desire

  "Ulysses" l. 30 (1842)

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• Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

  James Joyce

  Food, Heart, Fowl

  Ulysses (1922) p. 53

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• You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

  Roddy Doyle

  Book, People, Doubt

  "Overlong, overrated and unmoving: Roddy Doyle's verdict on James Joyce's Ulysses" by Angelique Chrisafis, www.theguardian.com. February 10, 2004.

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• The sax solo as we know it today would not exist without Gerry Rafferty. His 1978 soft-rock classic 'Baker Street' has to be the 'Ulysses' of rock & roll saxophone, giving the entire chorus over to Raphael Ravenscroft's sax solo, creating one of the Seventies' most enduringly creepy sounds.

  Rob Sheffield

  Rocks, Creating, Giving

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• My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.

  James Patterson

  Book, Years, Solitude

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• [Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

  Virginia Woolf

  Funny, Pimples, Insult

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• Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.'' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?'

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Smart, Thinking, Years

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• The head coach don't want no sissies, so he reads to us from something called Ulysses.

  Allan Sherman

  Want, Sissy, Coaches

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• I'm not sure which I dislike more: 'Ulysses' or the James Joyce estate. Admittedly, a few people have got some pleasure from 'Ulysses', but against that, you have to weigh the millions of lives that have been ruined by the futile attempts to read it.

  Kevin Myers

  Book, People, Language

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• Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, or has won the Golden Fleece, and then returns, experienced and knowledgeable, to spend the rest of his life among his family!

  Joachim du Bellay

  Life, Knowledge, Men

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• I used to carry a copy of Ulysses with me everywhere just in case I was knocked down by a bus. It seemed more important than having clean underwear.

  Craig Raine

  Clean Underwear, Important, Used

  "Genius or fallen idol?". Interviews with Sam Jones, www.theguardian.com. February 10, 2004.

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• Happy he who like Ulysses has made a great journey.

  Joachim du Bellay

  Journey, Great Journeys, Made

  Les Regrets Sonnet 31 (1558)

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• I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall; I'll slay more gazers than the basalisks; I'll play the orator as well as Nestor, Decieve more slily that Ulysses could, And like a Sinon, take another Troy. I can add colors to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages And set the murderous Machiavel to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? Tut! were it further off, I'll pluck it down.

  William Shakespeare

  School, Color, Play

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• Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Teenage, Book, Reading

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• Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is form of vengeance, of black-mail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.

  Alberto Moravia

  Loyalty, Self, People

  Alberto Moravia (2011). “Contempt”, p.93, New York Review of Books

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• Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'

  Salman Rushdie

  Night, World, Sometimes

  "On Censorship" by Salman Rushdie, www.newyorker.com. May 11, 2012.

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• You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

  William Faulkner

  Baptists, Old Testament, Should

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

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• Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

  James Joyce

  Voice, Creating, People

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• Mom had just gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Mom, Butterfly, Blue

  Audrey Niffenegger (2014). “The Time Traveler's Wife”, p.22, Simon and Schuster

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• A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance - And the myths that actually touched you at that time - not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas - but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman.

  Tom Wolfe

  Time, Aeneas, Age

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.46, Macmillan

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• I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S Grant in full military regalia.

  Mark Twain

  Marriage, Military, Ulysses's Grant

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• Concerning the Gods, there are those who deny the very existence of the Godhead; others say that it exists, but neither bestirs nor concerns itself not has forethought far anything. A third party attribute to it existence and forethought, but only for great and heavenly matters, not for anything that is on earth. A fourth party admit things on earth as well as in heaven, but only in general, and not with respect to each individual. A fifth, of whom were Ulysses and Socrates, are those that cry: -- I move not without Thy knowledge!

  Epictetus

  Party, Moving, Heaven

  Epictetus (2017). “The Philosophy of Epictetus: Golden Sayings and Fragments”, p.11, Courier Dover Publications

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