James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, 1882 - 1941
Photo by C. Ruf, Zurich (ca. 1918)
Born: 2 February 1882, Rathgar, Ireland
Died: 13 January 1941, Z
Joyce was born in a suburb of Dublin, the eldest of ten surviving children in a wealthy family that soon came on hard times through his father's drinking. He wrote his first poem at age nine, about the time that his father appeared in Stubbs Gazette, the official registry of bankruptcies and lost his job. Joyce had started at Clongowes Wood College in 1988, but four years later the family was unable to pay tuition. He studied at home for a while, then was offered entry to Belvedere College, a Jesuit school where it was hoped Joyce would join the order. Instead, while appreciating the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas he rejected Christianity. He entered University College Dublin in 1898, studying languages and was active in literary and dramatic groups. After graduating in 1903 he went to Paris to study medicine but couldn't keep up with the technical lectures in French. He eked out a living by reviewing books, teaching, and singing tenor and attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, a concept that he recrafted into the novel Stephen Hero, also not published in his lifetime, and finally released as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. He met Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Connemara, and they first went out on 16 June 1904, the date which would be the focus of Ulysses much later. After falling out with a roommate he and Nora left for Zürich, they actually married in 1931. He was teaching English at Pola (now in Croatia) when the course of the war caused the Austrians to expel all foreigners, he then moved back to Trieste, then Rome. His early work attracted support from a number of authors and other literary friends who supported him in various ways. After the war he moved to Paris and spent the last twenty years of his life there. He had severe eye problems, returning to Switzerland at least nine times for surgery and being completely blind at several points. He had completed Ulysses just before his 40th birthday but five hundred copies sent to America were seized by the postal authorities for obscenity, the same number were reprinted for him by friends, these were seized by authorities in England. The book was not cleared for sale in either country until 1931. AFter completing Finnegan's Wake he was forced to return to Zürich when the Nazis occupied Paris. On 11 January 1941 he was operated on for a perforated ulcer but lapsed into a coma the following day, and died a quarter hour after he regained consciousness. Ireland didn't want his body returned to the homeland he hadn't visited for almost twenty years, he is buried near the Zürich zoo.
Biography from Wikipedia and Authors' Calendar
Additional quotes from Wikiquote. Wikiquote entries are often "sourced" and may include items longer than those included here, particularly for poets, lyricists, and dramatists.
James Joyce quotes:
Quotes found : 82 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 6) 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next
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- A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. permalink
James Joyce - A father, said Stephen, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. permalink
James Joyce - Ulysses (1922) - A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. permalink
James Joyce - Ulysses (1922) - A man's errors are his portals of discovery. permalink
James Joyce - A nation is the same people living in the same place. permalink
James Joyce - All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine. permalink
James Joyce - Letter to Augusta Gregory (22 November 1902) - All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. permalink
James Joyce - And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart? permalink
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) - Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. permalink
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) - Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life. permalink
James Joyce - "James Clarence Mangan" lecture at University College, Dublin (1 February 1902) - Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. permalink
James Joyce - But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. permalink
James Joyce - But oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history. permalink
James Joyce - Ulysses (1922) - Children must be educated by love, not punishment. permalink
James Joyce - Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America. permalink
James Joyce - "The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran: England's Safety Valve in Case of War," Piccolo della Sera (Trieste, 5 September1912)
Quotes found : 82 — (15 per page, this is page 1 of 6) 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next
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