Home > Work > A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
61 " The sad quiet greyblue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen's heart. All that had been denied them had been freely given to him, the eldest: but the quiet glow of evening showed him in their faces no sign of rancour. "
― James Joyce , A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
62 " We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. "
63 " O mică trupă de țărani napolitani își repetau pașii de dans în capătul capelei, unii rotindu-și brațele deasupra capetelor, alții legănându-și coșurile cu violete de hârtie și făcând reverențe. "
64 " You can still die when the sun is shining. "
65 " 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. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? "
66 " I am proud to be an emotionalist. "
67 " Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. "
68 " 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. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys, and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.Art thou pale for wearinessOf climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,Wandering companionless...?He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him, and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving. "
69 " Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth... 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. "
70 " Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause. "
71 " 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. "
72 " In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl. "
73 " 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. "
74 " He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:A day of dappled seaborne clouds. "
75 " His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. "
76 " It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only Godcould do that. "
77 " I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too. "
78 " But though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people whoprayed said in their different languages still God remained always thesame God and God's real name was God. "
79 " White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: 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. "
80 " She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. "