Ulysses Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?

  Abraham Cowley

  Bible, Yield, Aeneas

  Abraham Cowley, Thomas Sprat (1710). “The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley ...: Consisting of Those which Were Formerly Printed, and Those which He Design'd for the Press, Publish'd Out of the Author's Original Copies ; with The Cutter of Coleman-street”

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• ...the men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame...many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side.

  Alistair Maclean

  Men, Long, Return

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• We must be careful what we read, and not, like the sailors of Ulysses, take bags of wind for sacks of treasure.

  John Lubbock

  Wind, Bags, Treasure

  John Lubbock (1913). “The Pleasures of the Life”

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• All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

  Henry Miller

  Funny, Book, Reading

  Henry Miller (2007). “Black Spring”, p.48, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

  Werner Herzog

  Men, Land, Example

  "Was the 20th Century a Mistake?". Interview with Paul Holdengräber, www.nypl.org. February 16, 2007.

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• I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce.

  Frederick Lenz

  Book, Thinking, Rama

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• Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

  Philip Pullman

  Clever, Writing, Stories

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November 2012.

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• In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.

  Frederick Lenz

  Writing, Years, Style

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• There is nothing like lying flat on your back on the deck, alone except for the helmsman aft at the wheel, silence except for the lapping of the sea against the side of the ship. At that time you can be equal to Ulysses and brother to him.

  Errol Flynn

  Brother, Lying, Sea

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• Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text.

  Philip Pullman

  Paradise, Fairy Tale, Lost

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November/December 2012.

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• ... A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel.

  Rebecca West

  Beautiful, Eye, Errors

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.139, Open Road Media

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• During the Civil War, on hearing complaints that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant drank alcohol to excess Find out what Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to each of my other generals!

  Abraham Lincoln

  War, Alcohol, Ulysses's Grant

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• Ulysses pissed me off. When Molly Bloom just says, "Yes I said yes I will Yes." And I'm thinking, You should be saying no, Molly. How about no? Saying no is great.

  Lynne Tillman

  Thinking

  The Believer interview, artwriting.sva.edu. December 23, 2017.

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• Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.

  E. M. Forster

  Dog, Character, Light

  'Aspects of the Novel' (1927) ch. 6 (on James Joyce's 'Ulysses')

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• Ulysses is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic.

  Tom Paulin

  Lying, Racism, Challenges

  "Not one of us" by Tom Paulin, www.theguardian.com. August 29, 2000.

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• Ulysses He ... saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid flatong flower.

  James Joyce

  Father, Flower, Dark

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• Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Love, Sea, Two

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