#ulysses

Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.'' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?' ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#always #enough #every #few #finally

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life! ↗

— Alfred Tennyson

#travel #ulysses #experience

The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#every #good #jesus #knight #lives

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it. ↗

— Raymond Queneau

#act #after #away #getting #joyce

Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey. ↗

— Raymond Queneau

#end #experience #finds #himself #his

He's meant to be that classic Homer, Ulysses, Hercules - a character who goes out or has some gift of some kind. He goes on a journey of discovery and part of that is falling into darkness - the temptations of life. ↗

— Robert Redford

#classic #darkness #discovery #falling #gift

What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses. ↗

— David Baker

#book #does #give #give me #grammar

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter , published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of Ulysses did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line 'Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter.' So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#george-orwell #influence #james-joyce #literary-criticism #literature

Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, or has won the Golden Fleece, and then returns, experienced and knowledgeable, to spend the rest of his life among his family. ↗

— Joachim du Bellay

#experienced #family #fine #golden #happy

A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth. ↗

— Declan Kiberd

#james-joyce #joyce #literature #ulysses #art