Bloomsday!
Today is Bloomsday, my favorite literary holiday. The great Irish writer James Joyce chose June 16, 1904, as the date in which his masterpiece, Ulysses, takes place because it was the date of his first outing with his future wife. Bloomsday has long been celebrated in Dublin and all over the world.
So in honor of what is, in my opinion, the greatest book ever written, here are several of my favorite quotes from Ulysses:
“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.”
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
“Let my country die for me.”
“Afraid of the chickens she is. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.”
“Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”
“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
And lastly, although this quote is from Dubliners, not Ulysses:
“The light music of whiskey falling into a glass—an agreeable interlude.”
