Ulysses quotes:

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  • When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing. -- Raymond Queneau
  • Happy he who like Ulysses has made a great journey. -- Joachim du Bellay
  • [Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. -- Virginia Woolf
  • Constant Penelope sends to thee, careless Ulysses. Write not again, but come, sweet mate -- Ovid
  • I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S Grant in full military regalia. -- Mark Twain
  • You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it. -- Roddy Doyle
  • I used to carry a copy of Ulysses with me everywhere just in case I was knocked down by a bus. It seemed more important than having clean underwear. -- Craig Raine
  • Education of youth is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher; but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave to Ulysses. -- John Milton
  • Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, or has won the Golden Fleece, and then returns, experienced and knowledgeable, to spend the rest of his life among his family! -- Joachim du Bellay
  • If I can leave a single message with the younger generation, it is to lash yourself to the mast, like Ulysses if you must, to escape the siren calls of complacency and indifference. -- Edward Kennedy
  • Ulysses is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic. -- Tom Paulin
  • 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
  • Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell. -- E. M. Forster
  • Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I'll write Ulysses." -- Philip Pullman
  • Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk -- James Joyce
  • Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey. -- Raymond Queneau
  • My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'. -- James Patterson
  • Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. -- James Joyce
  • After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it. -- Raymond Queneau
  • Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it. -- Orson Scott Card
  • Abraham Lincoln went through 12 generals before he got Ulysses S. Grant. He had never done a Civil War before. -- Marianne Williamson
  • And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. -- Alfred Lord Tennyson
  • 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
  • Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.' -- Salman Rushdie
  • How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life. -- Alfred Lord Tennyson
  • On the whole, I don't like reading long books. I'm not a fan of 'Ulysses.' And I haven't quite finished 'War and Peace.' -- Vikram Seth
  • George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all rode their wartime heroics into the White House. -- Jeff Greenfield
  • Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, or has won the Golden Fleece, and then returns, experienced and knowledgeable, to spend the rest of his life among his family. -- Joachim du Bellay
  • Originally, when I wrote the song 'The Sensual World' I had used text from the end of 'Ulysses.' When I asked for permission to use the text, I was refused, which was disappointing. -- Kate Bush
  • Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it. -- Roddy Doyle
  • Ulysses' is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic. -- Tom Paulin
  • 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
  • If you think of all the enduring stories in the world, they're of journeys. Whether it's 'Don Quixote' or 'Ulysses,' there's always this sense of a quest - of a person going away to be tested, and coming back. -- Robyn Davidson
  • 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
  • The sax solo as we know it today would not exist without Gerry Rafferty. His 1978 soft-rock classic 'Baker Street' has to be the 'Ulysses' of rock & roll saxophone, giving the entire chorus over to Raphael Ravenscroft's sax solo, creating one of the Seventies' most enduringly creepy sounds. -- Rob Sheffield
  • 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
  • Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. -- James Joyce
  • ... A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel. -- Rebecca West
  • Being a nerd, which is to say going to far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant. -- Sarah Vowell
  • Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. -- Alfred Lord Tennyson
  • I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production. -- George Orwell
  • Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all.... he is a complete man as well, a good man. -- James Joyce
  • Each Australian is a Ulysses. -- Christina Stead
  • I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce. -- Frederick Lenz
  • I think perhaps the greatest book ever written was Ulysses by James Joyce. -- Frederick Lenz
  • Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan? -- Robert A. Heinlein
  • Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey." -- Raymond Queneau
  • The head coach don't want no sissies, so he reads to us from something called Ulysses. -- Allan Sherman
  • You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith. -- William Faulkner
  • Ulysses was not comely, but he was eloquent, Yet he fired two goddesses of the sea with love -- Soren Kierkegaard
  • We must be careful what we read, and not, like the sailors of Ulysses, take bags of wind for sacks of treasure. -- John Lubbock
  • James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land. -- Werner Herzog
  • Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas? -- Abraham Cowley
  • Ulysses He ... saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid flatong flower. -- James Joyce
  • I read the book [My Life by Bill Clinton] completely. And I think it compares very favorably with Ulysses S. Grant's gold standard of presidential autobiographies. -- Dan Rather
  • Where as you go into playing something like Ulysses [on Black Panther], you go - I'm going to have this haircut and this cloth, you draw from different stimulus. -- Andy Serkis
  • During the Civil War, on hearing complaints that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant drank alcohol to excess Find out what Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to each of my other generals! -- Abraham Lincoln
  • Take this squirrel, for instance. Ulysses. Do I believe he can type poetry? Sure, I do believe it. There is much more beauty in the world if I believe such a thing is possible. -- Kate DiCamillo
  • All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content. -- Henry Miller
  • The words were good words, Ulysses felt, maybe even great words, but the list was very incomplete. He was just getting started. The words needed to be arranged, fussed with, put in the order of his heart. -- Kate DiCamillo
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  • Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text. -- Philip Pullman
  • A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance - And the myths that actually touched you at that time - not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas - but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman. -- Tom Wolfe
  • Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. -- William Saroyan
  • They even say that an altar dedicated to Ulysses , with the addition of the name of his father, Laertes , was formerly discovered on the same spot, and that certain monuments and tombs with Greek inscriptions, still exist on the borders of Germany and Rhaetia . -- Tacitus
  • I'm not sure which I dislike more: 'Ulysses' or the James Joyce estate. Admittedly, a few people have got some pleasure from 'Ulysses', but against that, you have to weigh the millions of lives that have been ruined by the futile attempts to read it. -- Kevin Myers
  • A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz -- James Lee Schmidt
  • There is nothing like lying flat on your back on the deck, alone except for the helmsman aft at the wheel, silence except for the lapping of the sea against the side of the ship. At that time you can be equal to Ulysses and brother to him. -- Errol Flynn
  • In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century. -- Frederick Lenz
  • In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century. -- Frederick Lenz
  • Why'd you even think I'd read your diploma before, during, or after buying 10 copies of it in an all-you-can-drink online bar? - If I could drink what I read, I'd probably still be drunk on Joyce's Ulysses. I should've chased it with a racer.-Stefan D and Jarod Kintz -- Stefan D
  • We haven't time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know-when every day we're running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew. -- Seneca the Younger
  • The censors have always had a field day with James Joyce, specifically with 'Ulysses,' but also with his other writings. The conventional wisdom is that this is because of sexually explicit passages (and there certainly are those). I have always thought that what the critics hated and feared about Joyce is his cry for human freedom. -- Karen DeCrow
  • Every generation likes to think that children don't read as much as they used to when they were young! You listen to some adults saying they were going around reading 'Ulysses' when they were seven or eight! I think children are voracious readers if you give them the right books and if you make those books accessible to them. -- Darren Shan
  • My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. -- John Updike
  • When I wrote 'Your Republic Is Calling You,' it was Franz Kafka's writing that I had most in mind, and James Joyce's 'Ulysses.' Entirely out of the blue, Kafka's characters receive an order to go somewhere, and when they try to comply, they never quite manage it. Ki-yong in 'Your Republic Is Calling You' is precisely that sort of character. -- Kim Young-ha
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