{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "slug": "a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-pg4217",
  "title": "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man",
  "quotes": [
    {
      "text": "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming\ndown along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road\nmet a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...."
    },
    {
      "text": "He felt his body small\nand weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and\nwatery."
    },
    {
      "text": "It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold."
    },
    {
      "text": "The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle."
    },
    {
      "text": "He felt his body small\nand weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and\nwatery."
    },
    {
      "text": "It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold."
    },
    {
      "text": "The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle."
    },
    {
      "text": "He felt his body small\nand weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and\nwatery."
    },
    {
      "text": "It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold."
    },
    {
      "text": "The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle."
    },
    {
      "text": "He was standing on the field; his hand was pressed\nto his side; his face was pale and strange and he wore the white cloak\nof a marshal."
    },
    {
      "text": "They were the ghosts of murderers, the figures of\nmarshals who had received their deathwound on battlefields far away\nover the sea."
    },
    {
      "text": "That was the way a rat felt, slimy and\ndamp and cold."
    },
    {
      "text": "he felt sorry for him that he was not a magistrate like the other boys’\nfathers."
    },
    {
      "text": "It is religion, Dante said. They are doing their duty in warning the\npeople."
    },
    {
      "text": "Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey, or the people may\nleave their church alone."
    },
    {
      "text": "He was a public sinner."
    },
    {
      "text": "There could be neither luck nor grace, Dante said, in a house where\nthere is no respect for the pastors of the church."
    },
    {
      "text": "We are an unfortunate\npriestridden race and always were and always will be till the end of\nthe chapter."
    },
    {
      "text": "Zeal without prudence is like a ship adrift."
    },
    {
      "text": "The day of your first communion was\nthe happiest day of your life."
    },
    {
      "text": "Gentlemen, the happiest day of my life was the day on which I made\nmy first holy communion."
    },
    {
      "text": "It was unfair and cruel because the doctor had told him not to read\nwithout glasses and he had written home to his father that morning to\nsend him a new pair."
    },
    {
      "text": "He felt the touch of the prefect’s fingers as they\nhad steadied his hand and at first he had thought he was going to shake\nhands with him because the fingers were soft and firm: but then in an\ninstant he had heard the swish of the soutane sleeve and the crash."
    },
    {
      "text": "The rector\nwould side with the prefect of studies and think it was a schoolboy\ntrick and then the prefect of studies would come in every day the same,\nonly it would be worse because he would be dreadfully waxy at any\nfellow going up to the rector about him."
    },
    {
      "text": "He was happy\nand free: but he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan."
    },
    {
      "text": "He did not\nwant to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial\nimage which his soul so constantly beheld."
    },
    {
      "text": "He would fade into something\nimpalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured."
    },
    {
      "text": "The ambition which he felt astir at times in\nthe darkness of his soul sought no outlet."
    },
    {
      "text": "The sudden flight from the comfort and reverie of Blackrock,\nthe passage through the gloomy foggy city, the thought of the bare\ncheerless house in which they were now to live made his heart heavy"
    },
    {
      "text": "He chronicled with patience what he saw,\ndetaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret."
    },
    {
      "text": "There remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen\nnor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly."
    },
    {
      "text": "The growth\nand knowledge of two years of boyhood stood between then and now,\nforbidding such an outlet"
    },
    {
      "text": "All the descriptions of fierce love and hatred which\nhe had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal"
    },
    {
      "text": "He gave them\near only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them,\nbeyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades"
    },
    {
      "text": "These voices had now come to be hollowsounding in his ears"
    },
    {
      "text": "The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple\nmovement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of\nall his day’s unrest"
    },
    {
      "text": "That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to\nbreathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go\nback."
    },
    {
      "text": "He had known neither the pleasure of\ncompanionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial\npiety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and\nloveless lust."
    },
    {
      "text": "He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the\nsun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer\nexisted."
    },
    {
      "text": "His mind seemed\nolder than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and\nregrets like a moon upon a younger earth."
    },
    {
      "text": "I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is\nSimon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is\nin the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and\nStephen and Victoria. Names."
    },
    {
      "text": "He had tried to build a breakwater of\norder and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to\ndam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial\nrelations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him."
    },
    {
      "text": "From without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers:\ntheir tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole."
    },
    {
      "text": "He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood\nto them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and\nfosterbrother."
    },
    {
      "text": "A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul."
    },
    {
      "text": "His days and\nworks and thoughts could make no atonement for him, the fountains of\nsanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul."
    },
    {
      "text": "The sentence of saint James which says that he who\noffends against one commandment becomes guilty of all had seemed to him\nfirst a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in the darkness\nof his own state."
    },
    {
      "text": "From the evil seed of lust all other deadly\nsins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others,\ncovetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures,\nenvy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious\nmurmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food,\nthe dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the\nswamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk."
    },
    {
      "text": "He had sinned\nmortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in\ndanger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every\nsucceeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment."
    },
    {
      "text": "He wanted to be held firmly in her\narms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly."
    },
    {
      "text": "The imagery of the psalms of\nprophecy soothed his barren pride."
    },
    {
      "text": "we have been\nsent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to do God’s\nholy will and to save our immortal souls."
    },
    {
      "text": "What doth it\nprofit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his\nimmortal soul?"
    },
    {
      "text": "He who remembers the last things\nwill act and think with them always before his eyes."
    },
    {
      "text": "Death is certain. The time and manner are uncertain, whether\nfrom long disease or from some unexpected accident: the Son of God\ncometh at an hour when you little expect Him."
    },
    {
      "text": "Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for\nhim who has walked in the right path,"
    },
    {
      "text": "He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant and\nGod cast him out of heaven into hell for ever."
    },
    {
      "text": "The straitness of this prison house\nis expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by\nHis laws."
    },
    {
      "text": "They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives\nforth no light."
    },
    {
      "text": "The torment of fire is the\ngreatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow\ncreatures."
    },
    {
      "text": "But the sulphurous brimstone which\nburns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for\never and for ever with unspeakable fury."
    },
    {
      "text": "but the fire of hell has this property\nthat it preserves that which it burns and though it rages with\nincredible intensity it rages for ever."
    },
    {
      "text": "It is a fire\nwhich proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own\nactivity but as an instrument of divine vengeance."
    },
    {
      "text": "As the waters of\nbaptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment\ntorture the spirit with the flesh."
    },
    {
      "text": "Evil company on\nearth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from\nthe company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them."
    },
    {
      "text": "In hell all\nlaws are overturned—there is no thought of family or country, of\nties, of relationships."
    },
    {
      "text": "The intention of\nthose law-givers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times,\nwas to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful\nbeasts."
    },
    {
      "text": "These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as\nhideous and ugly as they once were beautiful."
    },
    {
      "text": "Why did you not, even after\nyou had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or\nthe hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who only\nwaited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins?"
    },
    {
      "text": "Now the time\nfor repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more!"
    },
    {
      "text": "Sin, remember, is a twofold enormity. It is a base consent to the\npromptings of our corrupt nature to the lower instincts, to that which\nis gross and beastlike; and it is also a turning away from the counsel\nof our higher nature, from all that is pure and holy, from the Holy God\nHimself."
    },
    {
      "text": "God, remember, is a being infinitely good, and therefore the loss\nof such a being must be a loss infinitely painful."
    },
    {
      "text": "How could it be otherwise? Every breath that we draw, every thought of\nour brain, every instant of life proceeds from God’s inexhaustible\ngoodness."
    },
    {
      "text": "if it be pain for a mother to be parted from her child,\nfor a man to be exiled from hearth and home, for friend to be sundered\nfrom friend, O think what pain, what anguish it must be for the poor\nsoul to be spurned from the presence of the supremely good and loving\nCreator"
    },
    {
      "text": "Just as in dead bodies worms are engendered by\nputrefaction, so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual\nremorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the\nworm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting."
    },
    {
      "text": "They will remember all this and loathe themselves and their\nsins. For how miserable will all those pleasures seem to the soul\ncondemned to suffer in hellfire for ages and ages."
    },
    {
      "text": "They will behold their sins in all their foulness and\nrepent but it will be too late and then they will bewail the good\noccasions which they neglected."
    },
    {
      "text": "You had\ntime and opportunity to repent and would not. You were brought up\nreligiously by your parents. You had the sacraments and grace and\nindulgences of the church to aid you."
    },
    {
      "text": "In hell, on the contrary, one torment, instead of\ncounteracting another, lends it still greater force: and, moreover, as\nthe internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses, so\nare they more capable of suffering."
    },
    {
      "text": "There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften\nin the least the pains of hell."
    },
    {
      "text": "Nay, things which are good in\nthemselves become evil in hell. Company, elsewhere a source of comfort\nto the afflicted, will be there a continual torment:"
    },
    {
      "text": "But in hell the torments\ncannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity\nthey are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak,\ntaking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it\nwith a still fiercer flame."
    },
    {
      "text": "Nor can nature escape from these intense\nand various tortures by succumbing to them for the soul is sustained\nand maintained in evil so that its suffering may be the greater."
    },
    {
      "text": "Eternity! What\nmind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain."
    },
    {
      "text": "To bear even the sting of an\ninsect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment."
    },
    {
      "text": "At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would\nhave scarcely begun."
    },
    {
      "text": "Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven;\never to be shut off from the presence of God, never to enjoy the\nbeatific vision;"
    },
    {
      "text": "A sin, an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect, made Lucifer\nand a third part of the cohort of angels fall from their glory."
    },
    {
      "text": "Every word of sin is a wound in His\ntender side. Every sinful act is a thorn piercing His head."
    },
    {
      "text": "No matter how many or how foul the sins if you only repent of them they\nwill be forgiven you."
    },
    {
      "text": "He made you out of nothing. He\nloved you as only a God can love."
    },
    {
      "text": "It is impossible for any human being to\ndo that which offends so deeply the divine Majesty, that which is punished\nby an eternity of agony, that which crucifies again the Son of God and\nmakes a mockery of Him."
    },
    {
      "text": "He had to kneel before the minister of the Holy Ghost and tell\nover his hidden sins truly and repentantly."
    },
    {
      "text": "It was a terrible and\na sad thing to sin. But God was merciful to poor sinners who were truly\nsorry."
    },
    {
      "text": "It is a terrible sin. It kills the body and it kills\nthe soul."
    },
    {
      "text": "The\nworld for all its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for\nhis soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality."
    },
    {
      "text": "Frequent and violent temptations were a proof\nthat the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to\nmake it fall."
    },
    {
      "text": "Perhaps that first\nhasty confession wrung from him by the fear of hell had not been good?\nPerhaps, concerned only for his imminent doom, he had not had sincere\nsorrow for his sin?"
    },
    {
      "text": "the surest sign that his confession had been\ngood and that he had had sincere sorrow for his sin was, he knew, the\namendment of his life."
    },
    {
      "text": "It would be beautiful to die if God so willed. It was beautiful to live\nin grace a life of peace and virtue and forbearance with others."
    },
    {
      "text": "Once a priest\nalways a priest, remember."
    },
    {
      "text": "It is before you must weigh well, not after."
    },
    {
      "text": "He would fall. He had not\nyet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant."
    },
    {
      "text": "All seemed weary of life even before\nentering upon it."
    },
    {
      "text": "He was destined to\nlearn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others\nhimself wandering among the snares of the world."
    },
    {
      "text": "The wisdom of\nthe priest’s appeal did not touch him to the quick."
    },
    {
      "text": "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate\nlife out of life!"
    },
    {
      "text": "His soul was soaring in\nan air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath\nand delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the\nelement of the spirit."
    },
    {
      "text": "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate\nlife out of life!"
    },
    {
      "text": "A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal\nyouth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open\nbefore him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error\nand glory."
    },
    {
      "text": "His thinking\nwas a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the\nlightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in\nthose moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been\nfireconsumed;"
    },
    {
      "text": "The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter than any ivory\nsawn from the mottled tusks of elephants."
    },
    {
      "text": "The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s\nignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind\ndownward"
    },
    {
      "text": "The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How\ndifferent are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and\non mine!"
    },
    {
      "text": "My voice holds them at\nbay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language."
    },
    {
      "text": "The object of the artist is the creation\nof the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question."
    },
    {
      "text": "These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is\nlike looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go\ndown into the depths and never come up."
    },
    {
      "text": "If the lamp smokes or smells I\nshall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it\nand buy another."
    },
    {
      "text": "The soul of the gallant\nvenal city which his elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a\nfaint mortal odour rising from the earth"
    },
    {
      "text": "he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s\nhand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather,\nto lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace."
    },
    {
      "text": "The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you\nof. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the\nbody."
    },
    {
      "text": "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets\nflung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality,\nlanguage, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
    },
    {
      "text": "Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."
    },
    {
      "text": "Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of\nwhatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with\nthe human sufferer."
    },
    {
      "text": "Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the\npresence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and\nunites it with the secret cause."
    },
    {
      "text": "The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards\nterror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it."
    },
    {
      "text": "The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore\nstatic. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing."
    },
    {
      "text": "The arts\nwhich excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper\narts."
    },
    {
      "text": "Our flesh shrinks from what it\ndreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely\nreflex action of the nervous system."
    },
    {
      "text": "Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion\nwhich is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens,\nor ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis,\nan ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and\nat last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty."
    },
    {
      "text": "Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part\nto part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or\nparts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part."
    },
    {
      "text": "Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or\nintelligible matter for an esthetic end."
    },
    {
      "text": "the\ntrue and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which\nis appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible;\nbeauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most\nsatisfying relations of the sensible."
    },
    {
      "text": "Three\nthings are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance."
    },
    {
      "text": "The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and\nreprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like\nthat of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of\ncreation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,\ninvisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his\nfingernails."
    },
    {
      "text": "The instant wherein that supreme quality\nof beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended\nluminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and\nfascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic\npleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which\nthe Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as\nbeautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart."
    },
    {
      "text": "he had done well to leave the room in disdain. He had done well\nnot to salute her on the steps of the library. He had done well to\nleave her to flirt with her priest, to toy with a church which was the\nscullery-maid of christendom."
    },
    {
      "text": "He had left the classroom in disdain\nthat was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her\nrace lay behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a\nquick shadow."
    },
    {
      "text": "Reproduction is\nthe beginning of death."
    },
    {
      "text": "I’m a ballocks, he said, shaking his head in despair. I am and I\nknow I am. And I admit it that I am."
    },
    {
      "text": "Only he doesn’t know it. And that’s the only difference I see."
    },
    {
      "text": "And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight."
    },
    {
      "text": "They embraced softly, impelled by the grey rainy light, the wet\nsilent trees, the shieldlike witnessing lake, the swans."
    },
    {
      "text": "Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a\nmother’s love is not."
    },
    {
      "text": "Your mother brings you into the world, carries\nyou first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But\nwhatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be."
    },
    {
      "text": "I fear\nmore than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by\na false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of\nauthority and veneration."
    },
    {
      "text": "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake\nan absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is\nillogical and incoherent?"
    },
    {
      "text": "He had not even remembered rightly Nash’s line. All the images it had\nawakened were false. His mind bred vermin. His thoughts were lice born\nof the sweat of sloth."
    },
    {
      "text": "The soft beauty of the Latin word touched with an enchanting touch the\ndark of the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than the\ntouch of music or of a woman’s hand."
    },
    {
      "text": "Away then: it is time to go. A voice spoke softly to Stephen’s lonely\nheart, bidding him go and telling him that his friendship was coming to\nan end."
    },
    {
      "text": "The\nchurch is not the stone building nor even the clergy and their dogmas.\nIt is the whole mass of those born into it."
    },
    {
      "text": "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call\nitself my home, my fatherland, or my church"
    },
    {
      "text": "I will try to express\nmyself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as\nI can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence,\nexile and cunning."
    },
    {
      "text": "I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for\nanother or to leave whatever I have to leave."
    },
    {
      "text": "Not only to be separate from all others but to have not\neven one friend."
    },
    {
      "text": "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality\nof experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated\nconscience of my race."
    },
    {
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}