A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man quotes

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

…

O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold.

His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place.

But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

The bell rang and then the classes began to file out of the rooms and along the corridors towards the refectory. He sat looking at the two prints of butter on his plate but could not eat the damp bread.

Nasty Roche and Saurin drank cocoa that their people sent them in tins. They said they could not drink the tea; that it was hogwash. Their fathers were magistrates, the fellows said.

All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices.

He longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother’s lap. But he could not: and so he longed for the play and study and prayers to be over and to be in bed.

But he was not sick there.

He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

Fleming was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears.

And then the lower line tables and the tables of the third line.

And every single fellow had a different way of walking.

He sat in a corner of the playroom pretending to watch a game of dominos and once or twice he was able to hear for an instant the little song of the gas.

It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he could only think of God.

God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen.

Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying.

It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of the ears.

Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop.

How far away it was! It was better to go to bed to sleep. Only prayers in the chapel and then bed. He shivered and yawned. It would be lovely in bed after the sheets got a bit hot.

How far away they were! There was cold sunlight outside the window. He wondered if he would die.

You could die just the same on a sunny day.

He might die before his mother came. Then he would have a dead mass in the chapel like the way the fellows had told him it was when Little had died.

―Is it Christy? he said.

There’s more cunning in one of those warts on his bald head than in a pack of jack foxes.

He inclined his head, closed his eyes, and, licking his lips profusely, began to speak with the voice of the hotel keeper.

―And he has such a soft mouth when he’s speaking to you, don’t you know.

He’s very moist and watery about the dewlaps, God bless him.

Mr. Casey was still struggling through his fit of coughing and laughter. Stephen, seeing and hearing the hotel keeper through his father’s face and voice, laughed.

―

No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!

―Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face.

―

Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!

He sobbed loudly and bitterly.

And all over the playgrounds they were playing rounders and bowling twisters and lobs. And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricket bats through the soft grey air.

They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: little drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl.

Athy, who had been silent, said quietly:

and then all of a sudden she had broken away and had run laughing down the sloping curve of the path. Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold in the sun. Tower of Ivory. House of Gold.

By thinking of things you could understand them.

But why in the square? You went there when you wanted to do something. It was all thick slabs of slate and water trickled all day out of tiny pinholes and there was a queer smell of stale water there.

and when the rector had stooped down to give him the holy communion he had smelt a faint winy smell off the rector’s breath after the wine of the mass.

The word was beautiful: wine.

It made you think of dark purple because the grapes were dark purple that grew in Greece outside houses like white temples. But the faint smell of the rector’s breath had made him feel a sick feeling on the morning of his first communion.

Stephen knelt down quickly pressing his beaten hands to his sides.

To think of them beaten and swollen with pain all in a moment made him feel so sorry for them as if they were not his own but someone else’s that he felt sorry for.

And as he knelt, calming the last sobs in his throat and feeling the burning tingling pain pressed into his sides, he thought of the hands which he had held out in the air with the palms up and of the firm touch of the …

The great men in the history had names like that and nobody made fun of them. It was his own name that he should have made fun of if he wanted to make fun.

Dolan: it was like the name of a woman who washed clothes.

He had reached the door and, turning quickly up to the right, walked up the stairs; and, before he could make up his mind to come back, he had entered the low dark narrow corridor that led to the castle.

―

Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.

He became the ally of a boy named Aubrey Mills and founded with him a gang of adventurers in the avenue.

She came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down.

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide.

He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or reverie, he had heard their tale before.

―Shows you the spirit in which they take the boys there.

O, a jesuit for your life, for diplomacy!

He reassumed the provincial’s voice and repeated:

―No, said Heron,

Dedalus is a model youth. He doesn’t smoke and he doesn’t go to bazaars and he doesn’t flirt and he doesn’t damn anything or damn all.

Stephen shook his head and smiled in his rival’s flushed and mobile face, beaked like a bird’s. He had often thought it strange that Vincent Heron had a bird’s face as well as a bird’s name.

―

Tennyson a poet! Why, he’s only a rhymester!

―O, get out! said Heron. Everyone knows that Tennyson is the greatest poet.

Without waiting for his father’s questions he ran across the road and began to walk at breakneck speed down the hill. He hardly knew where he was walking.

Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind.

He strode down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire.

That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought.

It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart.

My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

―

I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus.

We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.

But he had not died then. Parnell had died. There had been no mass for the dead in the chapel and no procession.

He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun.

He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed.

―

Well, I’ll tell you the truth, said the little old man. I’m just twentyseven years of age.

―We’re as old as we feel, Johnny, said Mr. Dedalus. And just finish what you have there and we’ll have another. Here, Tim or Tom or whatever your name is, give us the same again here. By God, I don’t feel more than eighteen myself.

―

And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr. Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm.

―But did so much good, Simon, said the little old man gravely. Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.

Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them.

His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth.

No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety.

How foolish his aim had been!

He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him.

Useless. From without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole.

The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom he felt his belly crave for its food.

He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flour-fattened sauce. Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him.

What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley’s fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness.

The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space.

The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail.

The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail.

It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires.

They were quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos.

A little wave of quiet mirth broke forth over the class of boys from the rector’s grim smile.

Stephen’s heart began slowly to fold and fade with fear like a withering flower.

The rector went on gravely:

With one foot on the sea and one foot on the land he blew from the archangelical trumpet the brazen death of time. The three blasts of the angel filled all the universe.

Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.

At the last blast the souls of universal humanity throng towards the valley of Jehosaphat, rich and poor, gentle and simple, wise and foolish, good and wicked.

Against his sin, foul and secret, the whole wrath of God was aimed. The preacher’s knife had probed deeply into his disclosed conscience and he felt now that his soul was festering in sin. Yes, the preacher was right. God’s turn had come.

Like a beast in its lair his soul had lain down in its own filth but the blasts of the angel’s trumpet had driven him forth from the darkness of sin into the light.

The words of doom cried by the angel shattered in an instant his presumptuous peace. The wind of the last day blew through his mind;

and through the fissure between the last blind and the sash a shaft of wan light entered like a spear and touched the embossed brasses of the candlesticks upon the altar that gleamed like the battle-worn mail armour of angels.

Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. It would rain forever, noiselessly.

The water would rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be choked off, noiselessly: birds, men, elephants, pigs, children:

―Now let us try for a moment to realise, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners.

Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke.

The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws.

He passed up the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and shapeless.

And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he was plunging headlong through space.

He could not grip the floor with his feet and sat heavily at his desk, opening one of his books at random and poring over it. Every word for him. It was true. God was almighty.

And the glimmering souls passed away, sustained and failing, merged in a moving breath.

One soul was lost; a tiny soul: his. It flickered once and went out, forgotten, lost.

The end: black, cold, void waste.

He would love his neighbour. He would love God who had made and loved him. He would kneel and pray with others and be happy. God would look down on him and on them and would love them all.

It was easy to be good. God’s yoke was sweet and light.

It was better never to have sinned, to have remained always a child, for God loved little children and suffered them to come to Him. It was a terrible and a sad thing to sin.

The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant.

Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.

He crossed the bridge over the stream of the Tolka and turned his eyes coldly for an instant towards the faded blue shrine of the Blessed Virgin which stood fowl-wise on a pole in the middle of a hamshaped encampment of poor cottages.

He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them. He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices.

Even before they set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already of the way.

He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through an endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children and heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring note of weariness and pain.

The university! So he had passed beyond the challenge of the sentries who had stood as guardians of his boyhood and had sought to keep him among them that he might be subject to them and serve their ends.

Pride after satisfaction uplifted him like long slow waves.

The end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen path and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him.

―

A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds.

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death—the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without—cerements, the linens of the grave?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes.

Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

Or where was he?

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.

He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the …

His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul forever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy.

Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!

Her image had passed into his soul forever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call.

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!

A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.

Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!

A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.

On and on and on and on!

―

He has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch is masculine.

―Ah, it’s a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and you’ll live to rue the day you set your foot in that place. I know how it has changed you.

―From me! said Stephen in astonishment.

I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky.

―These questions are very profound, Mr. Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up.

―I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light.

If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy another.

―Epictetus also had a lamp, said the dean, which was sold for a fancy price after his death. It was the lamp he wrote his philosophical dissertations by. You know Epictetus?

―

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.

How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech.

―The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit.

His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech.

I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay.

My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

―And to distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime, the dean added, to distinguish between moral beauty and material beauty. And to inquire what kind of beauty is proper to each of the various arts. These are some interesting points we might take up.

―

He has the face of a besotted Christ.

The scorn and anger in his voice brought Cranly’s eyes back from a calm survey of the walls of the hall.

It was his epitaph for all dead friendships and Stephen wondered whether it would ever be spoken in the same tone over his memory.

The heavy lumpish phrase sank slowly out of hearing like a stone through a quagmire.

Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling its heaviness depress his heart. Cranly’s speech, unlike that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms.

―

Keep your icon. If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus.

―By hell, that’s a good one! said the gipsy student to those about him, that’s a fine expression. I like that expression immensely.

―The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.

You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.

You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Davin knocked the ashes from his pipe.

―Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head sadly. But in a moment his sadness left him and he was hotly disputing with Cranly and the two players who had finished their game.

Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so:

Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.

Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished.

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

―Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.

The instant flashed forth like a point of light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form was veiling softly its afterglow. O!

In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh.

Gabriel the seraph had come to the virgin’s chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light.

Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain. He had done well not to salute her on the steps of the library.

He had done well to leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy with a church which was the scullery-maid of christendom.

Rude brutal anger routed the last lingering instant of ecstasy from his soul. It broke up violently her fair image and flung the fragments on all sides. On all sides distorted reflections of her image started from his memory:

―Do you like what you seen of me, straight hair and curly eyebrows?

And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his anger was also a form of homage.

He had left the classroom in disdain that was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her race lay behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow.

―The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm, is the sentence at the end of the zoology.

Reproduction is the beginning of death.

He touched Stephen timidly at the elbow and said eagerly:

He had not even remembered rightly Nash’s line. All the images it had awakened were false. His mind bred vermin.

His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth.

He came back quickly along the colonnade towards the group of students. Well then, let her go and be damned to her! She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair on his chest. Let her.

He had not even remembered rightly Nash’s line. All the images it had awakened were false.

His mind bred vermin.

His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth.

―Hell, Temple said. I can respect that invention of the grey spouse of Satan.

Hell is Roman, like the walls of the Romans, strong and ugly.

But what is limbo?

―

A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.

Cranly laughed, tightening his grip on Stephen’s arm, and said:

―

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas!

What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too.

Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the words, said with assumed carelessness: