—Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We mustn’t be led away by words, by sounds of words.
(Chapter 7, Aeolus)
—Shite and onions!
(Simon Dedalus in the same chapter)
Obviously not complete, far from complete, and probably done better on a thousand other websites, but these are the key quotes everyone should know – then some secondary quotes and recurring phrases which stood out to me.
Key quotes to memorise
Opening of the whole book:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.
(Chapter 1, Telemachus)
Haines the Englishman is typically obtuse about his country’s history of oppressing the Irish:
—I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.
(Chapter 1, Telemachus)
Stephen in conversation with the headmaster, Mr Deasy, suddenly blurts out a key manifesto statement:
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
(Chapter 2, Nestor)
The famous introduction of Leopold Bloom at the start of part 2, chapter 4:
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.
(Chapter 4, Calypso)
Stephen and Bloom step out into the latter’s garden to have a pee under the stars, under:
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
(Chapter 17, Eumaeus)
The novel’s final words:
… he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
(Chapter 18, Penelope)
Stephen’s beliefs
At the chandelier-smashing climax of ‘Circe’ Stephen shouts his studied refusal to bow down to any authority, his steely determination to be free of all constraints.
Non serviam!
(Chapter 15, Circe)
Stephen’s vision of the apocalypse, glimpsed incongruously in the classroom of Deasy’s school (chapter 2), but then (bathetically) repeated at the climax of the brothel scene, when he smashes the chandelier with his cane (chapter 15).
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame.
(Chapter 2, Nestor)
Secondary quotes
Buck Mulligan facetiously looking out over the sea:
The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
(Chapter 1, Telemachus)
Mr Deasy is talking about Justice:
I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.
(Chapter 2, Nestor)
First of the 63 newspaper headlines in ‘Aeolus’:
IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS
(Chapter 7, Aeolus)
Stephen’s story of the two old ladies who go up Nelson’s Column and have a picnic of plums:
—And settle down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the statue of the onehandled adulterer.
(Chapter 7, Aeolus)
Half-drunk Stephen in the cabman’s shelter:
‘We can’t change the world, but we can change the subject.’
(Chapter 16, Eumaeus)
Leopold Bloom’s easy-going reflection after he’s had a pleasant play on the beach.
‘Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.’
(Chapter 13, Nausicaa)
Songs and jingles
One of the many adverts:
What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?
Incomplete.
With it an abode of bliss.
One of the 1,000 or so songs quoted or referenced:
Those girls, those girls,
Those lovely seaside girls.
All dimpled cheeks and curls,
Your head it simply swirls.
Key phrases
Agenbite of inwit
A phrase from Middle English literally meaning ‘again-biting of inner wit’ (inward knowledge). It derives from a 14th-century (1340) translation of a French moral treatise, Ayenbite of Inwyt by Dan Michel of Canterbury. It denotes the sharp, stinging pain of guilt or self-reproach. Joyce uses it as a characteristically fancy way of denoting guilt, the biting of conscience, specifically Stephen Dedalus’s guilt over his refusal to kneel and pray at his mother’s deathbed.
Ineluctable modality of the visible
This literally means the unavoidable or inescapable (ineluctable) way (modality) in which the physical world is perceived through sight (visible).
In other words, we cannot avoid perceiving the world mostly from its surface appearance or, as Stephen puts it in another phrase: ‘Signatures of all things I am here to read’ and immediately goes on to ‘read’ what he sees in front of him, on Sandymouth strand: ‘seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.’
In this Stephen appears to be following the philosophical tradition of Aristotelian empiricism (learning from sensory data) rather than the opposite tradition, inherited from Plato and generally named Idealism, whereby our primary knowledge comes not from the senses but from preformed Ideas in our minds, what Plato called archetypes.
The Plato versus Aristotle, Ideas versus senses dichotomy, is echoed in the National Library where Stephen opposes the idealising neoplatonic aesthetic of A.E. and John Eglinton (the belief that art derives from and raises us into a transcendent level) with his autobiographical theory, that Shakespeare’s plays derive from the emotional mess of his own highly imperfect life (notably his wife’s infidelity). As A.E. puts it:
the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom; Plato’s world of ideas.
High ideals versus low (and often vulgar) realities. All of ‘Ulysses’ can be seen as embodying (with the emphasis on ‘body’) Joyce’s insistence on low, physical bodily functions (all that farting and pooing and peeing and masturbating).
This focus on immediate sense data underpins Stephen’s character and numerous thoughts, for example when later on he thinks:
—Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
To quote the Psychedelic Furs, ‘Nothing else is happening. This is where you are.’
It has a political aspect as well. The high-minded Idealistic view tends towards monism, that there is One Great Thing, which tends towards uniformity, tyranny and intolerance. Aristotle’s worldview, by contrast, begins with the multiplicity of things as they actually are and so has, perforce, to be more accepting, tolerant and open.
Plato’s political thought is laid out in his dialogue, the Republic, where the state is ruled by Philosopher Kings and is incredibly strict, forbidding any signs of unorthodoxy. Which comes out in Stephen’s edgy exchange with John Eglinton:
John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:
—Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato.
—Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his commonwealth?
I am – as most liberals these days I imagine are – with Stephen and Aristotle and against authoritarian Plato.
Credit
‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.
Related links
Joyce reviews
- Dubliners (1914)
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Wandering Rocks
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Eumaeus
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope
Books & Boots 