James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941) left Ireland at twenty-two and wrote about almost nothing else for the rest of his life. Dubliners (1914) took nine years to find a publisher willing to print it; its closing story, “The Dead”, is regularly called the finest short story in English. Joyce is quoted less for aphorism than for cadence — the lines that travel are the ones that simply describe something. Quotes here name the story they come from.