James Joyce Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by James Joyce with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.”
Meaning & context
Stephen Dedalus declares that inherited loyalties will not command him once he no longer believes in them, tying independence to artistic self-definition.
Source details
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Project Gutenberg #4217. Stephen says this to Cranly near the end of the novel; it is a fictional character’s program of artistic and personal independence, not a universal rule.
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“One by one they were all becoming shades.”
Meaning & context
Gabriel’s thoughts widen from one dead young man to the mortality of everyone around him, preparing the story’s final meditation on memory and the living and dead.
Source details
“The Dead,” in Dubliners, Project Gutenberg #2814. The line belongs to Gabriel Conroy’s interior reflection after Gretta tells him about Michael Furey; it is fictional free-indirect narration.
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“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Meaning & context
Stephen compresses his troubled relation to inherited political, religious and personal history into an image of trying to wake from something oppressive that still shapes the present.
Source details
Ulysses, Episode 2 (“Nestor”), Project Gutenberg #4300. Stephen Dedalus says the line during his conversation with Mr Deasy; it is fictional dialogue inside a modernist novel and should not be flattened into Joyce’s direct historical thesis.