“Maud Gonne’s letter about taking them off O’Connell street at night: disgrace to our Irish capital.” (Lotus eaters)
“…waters of oblivion” (Lotus eaters)
“Gravediggers in Hamlet. Shows the profound knowledge of the human heart.” (Hades)
“– The moon, professor MacHugh said. He forgot Hamlet.” (Aeolus)
“In mourning for Sallust, Mulligan says.” (Aeolus)
“- Lay on, Macduff!” (Aeolus)
“- You remind me of Antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of Gorgias, the sophist. It is said of him that none could tell if he were bitterer against others or against himself. He was the son of a noble and a bondwoman. And he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope.” (Aeolus)
“But then Shakespeare has no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts. Solemn.
Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit
Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth.” (Laestrygonians)
“Mad Fanny and his other sister Mrs Dickinson driving about with scarlet harness.” (Lestrygonians)
“– And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister? A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life…One always feels that Goethe’s judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.” (Scylla)
“- I feel you would need one more for Hamlet. Seven is dear to the mystic mind. The shining seven W. B. calls them.” (Scylla)
“- Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.” (Scylla)
“– All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen’s discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.” (Scylla)
“– The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely. Aristotle was once Plato’s schoolboy.” (Scylla)
“– Mallarmé, don’t you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don’t you know, reading the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don’t you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.” (Scylla)
“- A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for nothing was he a butcher’s son wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palm. Nine lives are taken off for his father’s one, Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.” (Scylla)
“Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!” (Scylla)
“… I mean, we have the plays. I mean when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived? As for living, our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l’Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet’s drinking, the poet’s debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal.” (Scylla)
“Did you hear Miss Mitchell’s joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn’s wild oats? Awfully clever, isn’t it? They remind one of don Quixote and Sancho Panza.” (Scylla)
“– If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, Shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?” (Scylla)
“The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.
— I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of the public. And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr George Bernard Shaw.” (Scylla)
“– That may be too, Stephen said. There is a saying of Goethe’s which Mr Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life.” (Scylla)
“- Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus’ brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism, as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit.” (Scylla)
“– A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him myriadminded.” (Scylla)
“– And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père?) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most.” (Scylla)
“Gravediggers bury Hamlet pére and Hamlet fils.” (Scylla)
“Between this point and the high, at present unlit, warehouses of Beresford Place Stephen thought to think of Ibsen,…” (Eumaeus)
“What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him, potential poet, at the age of 11 in 1877 on the occasion of the offering of three prizes at 10/-, 5/- and 2/6 respectively by the Shamrock, a weekly newspaper?
An ambition to squint
At my verses in print
Makes me hope that for these you’ll find room.
If you so condescend
Then please place at the end
The name of yours truly, L. Bloom.” (Ithaka)
“What acrostic upon the abbreviation of his first name had he (kinetic poet) sent to Miss Marion Tweedy on the 14 February 1888?
Poets oft have sung in rhyme
Of music sweet their praise divine.
Let them hymn it nine times nine.
Dearer far than song or wine,
You are mine. The world is mine.” (Ithaka
Ulysses by Joyce 