#ulysses

(...) You cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop. ↗

— James Joyce

#joyce #ulysses #humor

In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength. ↗

— Ovid

#classics #greek #humans #intelligence #metamorphoses

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

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

Each imagining himself to be the first last and only alone, whereas he is neither first last nor last nor only not alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity. ↗

— James Joyce

#joyce #ulysses #imagination