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"Anything dead coming back to life hurts."

"For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one."

"The painter does not conceive himself as existing in himself, he conceives himself as a reflection of the objects he has put into his pictures and he lives in the reflections of his pictures, a writer, a serious writer, conceives himself as existing by and in himself, he does not at all live in the reflection of his books, to write he must first of all exist in himself."

"-- It is a curious thing, do you know...how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve..."

"-- I said that I had lost the faith -- Stephen answered -- but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent? --"

“‘We are right,’ he said, ‘and the others are wrong. To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it. To try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art.’”

“The world for all its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality. So entire and unquestionable was this sense of the divine meaning in all nature granted to his soul that he could scarcely understand why it was in any way necessary that he should continue to live.”

"No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon."

“But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he could think only of God. God was Gods’s name just as his name was Stephen.”

"If the heart were full to overflowing, adjectives would be redundant. What is needed are words that go beyond words. Beauty that can be described in words is not beauty that has been deeply felt."

"Society cannot be proud when a product is available to only a select few. Neither can clothing that is worn only on special occasions be considered a social ideal. Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride."

"Now, unfortunately...almost all manufacture is relegated to machines. From these machines there may appear a kind of beauty, which we shouldn't dismiss out of hand. But this beauty has its limits. We shouldn't rely on it unreservedly, without careful thought. What machines produce is standardized beauty, calibrated and fixed, and beauty built to a standard will remain merely that."

I hate the did not finish shelf!!!!!!!

"Did you have a subconscious, father? It seems to me that that sort of thing wasn't invented until after your time, as if the Ottomans were completely incapable of such a notion. When I picture you in your fez and frock coat I can't quite square that image with the idea of 'existential dread.'"

"I'm here, dear reader. I wonder: Where are you?"

It’s the waiting, the anticipation, that makes fear and paranoia so powerful against our minds. Being stuck in that state of bubbling for fear so long, even when there is nothing in reality to worry about, causes us to go insane. The idea of our fear consumes us and uses us as a vehicle through which to spread itself.

"I! I shouted, as loudly as I could. Then I repeated my name several times. I, the victim of a secret sect, am withering away like a houseplant. I, who don't know how to look after a houseplant, can't even look after myself. Accused of wanting solitude, I've been condemned to it. I oppose this verdict with all my strength. I can't take the loneliness anymore, I want to be among people."

"Despite her fear, she got closer; her entire life, whatever she did she did in spite of her fear, otherwise she'd have just up and vanished a long time ago."

"I could get so obsessed over something that the very number of my thoughts decreased..."

"In the morning I woke up happy. Sleep allowed me to spend one quarter of my day not counting the minutes."

Pure compulsion, in every character.