Multi-lingual Trieste: ‘I cannot begin to give you the flavour of the old Austrian Empire. It was a ramshackle affair but it was charming, gay, and I experienced more kindnesses in Trieste than ever before or since in my life.’ (Joyce to Stuart Gilbert; traditionally quoted in paper calls for the Trieste Joyce School.)

On the characters of Ulysses: ‘They all belong to a vanished world, and most of them seem to have been very curious types.’ (Letter to Mrs William Murray, 21 Dec. 1922.)

1] I am nauseated by their lying drivel about pure me and pure women and spiritual love and love for ever: blatant lying in the face of the truth (LII, 191-92; Johnson, viii.)
2] What is wrong with all these Irish writers? - What the blazes are they snivelling about? O, blind, snivelling, nose-dropping, calumniated Christ, wherefore were these men begotten? (LII, 78; Johnson viii)
3] Am I the only honest person that has come of out Ireland in our time? How dusty these phrases are!' (LII, 171; Johnson, viii.)
4] It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs toung my stories. (LII, 63-64.)
5] I fight to retain [these phrases] because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country. (LI, 62-63; Johnson, viii.)
6] On ‘bloody’: ‘the word, the exact expression in the English language which can create on the reader the effect which I wish to create' (LII, 136; Johnson, ix.)
7] I have written it ... with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more deform, whatever he has seen and heard. I cannot do any more than this. I cannot alter what I have written. All of these objections to which the printer is now the mouthpiece arouse in my mind when I was writing the book. I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people. The printer denounces Two Gallants and Counterparts. A Dubliner would denounce Ivy Day in the Committee Room. The more subtle inquisitor will denounce The Encounter the enormity of which the printer cannot see because he is, as I said, a plain blunt man. The Irish priest will denounce The Sisters. The Irish boarding-house keeper will denounce The Boarding House. Do not let the printer imagine, for goodness' sake, that he is going to have all the barking to himself. (LLII, 134; Johnson, x.)
8] I am writing a series of epicleti - ten - for a paper. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of the hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city. (LI, 55; Johnson, p.xi.)
9] What is the matter with you is that you are afraid to live. You and people like you. This city is suffering from hemiplegia of the will (Reported in Stanislaus’s MKB, 1958; rep. NY 1969, p.247.
10] Mother said I was ‘a mocker’. Am I? (LII, 194; Johnson xii).
11] I have tried to present [Dublin] to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in that order. (LII, 134; Johnson, p.xiv.)
12] 5 May 1906: My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present to an indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written for the most part in a spirit of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still less deform, whatever he has seen and heard.’ (LII, 134; Johnson xvii.)*
13] allusions [to Edward VII] made by a person of the story in the idiom of his social class. (LII, 262; Johnson, p.xxii.)
14] I am one of the writers who are perhaps creating at last a conscience in the soul of this wretched race. (To Nora - SL, 204; Valente, Joyce and the Problem of Justice, 1995.)

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