Dubliners Quotes

Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.

Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

There’s no friends like the old friends.

The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind.

No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.

He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.

But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.