Joyce > Joyce's Quotes

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.”
― C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love...We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I think I love you, Cal." -Abra
I'm not good." -Cal
Because you're not good." -Abra”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I wonder how many people I have looked at all my life and never really seen.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“What I’ve learned from talking to so many victims of traumatic events, abuse, or neglect is that after absorbing these painful experiences, the child begins to ache. A deep longing to feel needed, validated, and valued begins to take hold. As these children grow, they lack the ability to set a standard for what they deserve. And if that lack is not addressed, what often follows is a complicated, frustrating pattern of self-sabotage, violence, promiscuity, or addiction.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“So I’m not crazy?” “No. Your brain is doing exactly what you would expect it to do considering what you lived through.”
― Oprah Winfrey, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged. As psychologist Virginia Satir puts it, we feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty. Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“Some things are more precious because they don't last long.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“We rant and rave against God for the evil we have to endure but hardly blink at the evil in our own hearts.”
― Joni Eareckson Tada, The God I Love: A Lifetime of Walking with Jesus

“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

From: The House of Christmas, as anthologized in Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed., The Home Book of Verse, Volume 1 (New York: Henry Holt And Company, 1912); Project Gutenberg Etext #2619.”
― G. K. Chesterton.

“She knows that no single specific experience led to her loss of language.

Language worn ragged over thousands of years, from wear and tear by countless tongues and pens. Language worn ragged over the course of her life, by her own tongue and pen. Each time she tried to begin a sentence, she could feel her aged heart. Her patched and repatched, dried-up, expressionless heart. The more keenly she felt it, the more fiercely she clasped the words. Until all at once, her grip slackened. The dulled fragments dropped to her feet. The saw-toothed cogs stopped turning. A part of her, the place within her that had been worn down from hard endurance, fell away like flesh, like soft tofu dented by a spoon.”
― Han Kang, Greek Lessons

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro