Ulysses Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• Education of youth is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher; but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave to Ulysses.

  John Milton

  Teacher, Teaching, Men

  John Milton (2013). “The Collected Prose Works of John Milton (Annotated Edition)”, p.328, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Each Australian is a Ulysses.

  Christina Stead

  Australia, Australian

  Christina Stead (1945). “For Love Alone”, p.255, The Miegunyah Press

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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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• Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all.... he is a complete man as well, a good man.

  James Joyce

  Kings, Husband, Father

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• ...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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• 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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• I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.

  George Orwell

  Book, Taken, Voice

  George Orwell (1998). “The complete works of George Orwell”

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• If I can leave a single message with the younger generation, it is to lash yourself to the mast, like Ulysses if you must, to escape the siren calls of complacency and indifference.

  Edward Kennedy

  Generations, Sirens, Complacency

  Edward Moore Kennedy (1979). “Our Day and Generation: The Words of Edward M. Kennedy”

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• We haven't time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know-when every day we're running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew.

  Seneca the Younger

  Running, Spiritual, Storm

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

  Frederick Lenz

  Book, Thinking, Rama

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• In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Style, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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