Stephen Dedalus

“ Much in the same way as water seeks its own level, so Stephen had a level he, too, involuntarily sought. He had been born with the love of success running in his veins and it wouldn't be denied.
Mr. Palmer, the general manager of the Cataract Mills, became very much interested in Stephen Dallas. He had no son of his own; he had no protégé in whom to feel pride and pleasure. He could well feel pride and pleasure in Stephen. Stephen was by nature very adaptable, very approachable. ”

“ Desmoulins none the less, giving house-room to her and her daughter, and making her an allowance of half-a-guinea a week, a sum equal to a twelfth part of his pension. Francis Barker has already been mentioned, and we have a dim vision of a Miss Carmichael, who completed what he facetiously called his "seraglio." It was anything but a happy family. He summed up their relations in a letter to Mrs. Thrale. "Williams," he says, "hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss Carmichael) loves none of them." ”

“ Rastle, cheerily, “I’m not going to scold you. But if you take my advice you will try and do the next exercise by yourself. Of course you can’t expect to be perfect all at once, but if you always copy off Raddleston, do you see, you’ll never get on at all.”
“I’ll try, sir,” said Stephen, meaning what he said.
“I know you will, my boy. It’s not easy work to begin with, but it’s easier far in the long run. Try, and if you have difficulties, as you are sure to have, come to me. I’m always here in the evenings, and we’ll hammer it out between us. ”

“ Now you are all dispersed and scattered: no discussions, no committees, little correspondence—and you yourself are ever brooding and ever in conclave, with persons too who I know, for Stephen has told me so, are the preachers of violence: violence perhaps that some of them may preach, yet will not practise: both bad; traitors it may be, or, at the best, hare-brained men."
"Stephen is prejudiced," said Gerard. "He is a visionary, indulging in impossible dreams, and if possible, little desirable. He knows nothing of the feeling of the country or the character of his countrymen. ”

“ But her eyes would look cold, though her voice might be gentle, and her hand when it fondled would be tentative, unwilling. The hand would be making an effort to fondle, and Stephen would be conscious of that effort. Then looking up at the calm, lovely face, Stephen would be filled with a sudden contrition, with a sudden deep sense of her own shortcomings; she would long to blurt all this out to her mother, yet would stand there tongue-tied, saying nothing at all. ”

“ That intense dislike, which is far from uncommon, for severe reasoning has even made a kind of reproach to Edwards of what is called his 'inexorable logic.' To condemn a man for being honestly in the wrong is generally admitted to be unreasonable; but people are even more unforgiving to the sin of being honestly in the right. The frankness with which Edwards avowed opinions, not by any means peculiar to himself, has left a certain stain upon his reputation. ”

“ As in high estate it is a vice to go too low, so in low estate it does harm to go too high. Dedalus had a son named Icharus, and they were in prison with Minotaurus and could not escape. This Dedalus then fashioned wings for himself and his son, and he warned his son not to fly too high, lest the wax with which his wings were set on should melt with the sun. ”

“ He had no forgiveness, no charity, for his father. He told his mother and his older sister Fanny that he wished they could dispose of the ruined thing his father had made of the Dallas reputation as easily as they could dispose of the ruined thing he had made of his body. But no, the reputation they must wear tied round their necks for everybody to see, and stare at, and keep away from. Obliged as he was to bear his father's name (why had his parents handicapped him thus?) he could never hope to succeed in any large way, he said; for who would ever trust a man with the name of Stephen Dallas? ”

“ Venerable too is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! ”

“ for, if the people at large be not already convinced that a sufficient general case has been made out for Administrative Reform, I think they never can be, and they never will be. There is, however, an old indisputable, very well known story, which has so pointed a moral at the end of it that I will substitute it for a new case: by doing of which I may avoid, I hope, the sacred wrath of St. Stephen’s. ”

“ Life loves him and flees before him, and as with the eyes of a woman looks out and beckons him. She is the secret mistress of his heart; as yet she is unknown, her love unrevealed, her mystery and meaning unexplored. ”

“ The evening was clear and cold. A full moon rose behind the black crags of Orthobene and flooded the garden with gold. The two children, flattening their noses against the window pane, heard a long despairing wail, a human or superhuman lament.
"Whatever's that?" said Anania; "it must be a devil! I won't go. I'm frightened."
"Then stay here, silly. It's only a cat!" said Bustianeddu scornfully, "I'm going. I'll hide the money in the oak, where Uncle Pera won't think of looking. Then I'll come back. You stay here and keep watch. If any danger comes, whistle." ”

“ There is vigorous writing enough, and effective ridicule of Steele’s literary style and political alarmism. But it is painfully obvious, as in the attack upon Burnet, that personal animosity is now the predominant instead of an auxiliary feeling. Swift is anxious beyond all things to mortify and humiliate an antagonist. And he is in proportion less efficient as a partizan, though more amusing. ”

“ They dwell in their present moment, eyes burn, hearts beat faster, lips frame vain words. The same moon is on high, the same odour in the air. They bend their gaze towards the throne, they flock towards the throne as if the touch of it were miraculous. ”

“ Addison, we know, was most charming when talking to a single companion, and Delany repeats Swift’s statement that, often as they spent their evenings together, they never wished for a third. Steele, for a time, was joined in what Swift calls a triumvirate; and though political strife led to a complete breach with Steele and a temporary eclipse of familiarity with Addison, it never diminished Swift’s affection for his great rival. “That man,” he said once, “has virtue enough to give reputation to an age,” and the phrase expresses his settled opinion. ”

“ We had by this time lifted ourselves high out of the gloomy valleys and had attained to a rarer atmosphere and a clearer world, where the forest lay below like a book that has been read and above it rose the eternal hills lifting their mighty granite shoulders to the sky. ”

“ We walked by winding ways across the graveyard and saw many an old man and woman knocking at the door of the earth they would soon enter, dropping placid tears and thinking what it would be like some years hence when they would be under the earth and this festive crowd of live beings above, candle-lighting, feasting, singing, thinking, praying. And there were young men and women walking arm-in-arm, looking brightly into one another’s eyes, strengthening their bonds of love and of life. ”

“ With stiff wooden legs, they swept on in a never-ending race, while a great orchestrion clamored in wild speed. The summer sunlight sprinkled its gold upon the garnet canopies carried by the tireless racers and upon all the devices of decoration that made Stimson's machine magnificent and famous. A host of laughing children bestrode the animals, bending forward like charging cavalrymen, and shaking reins and whooping in glee. ”

“ It smote them motionless in their gleeful prowl, as the stern voice from the sky smites the legendary malefactor. They might have been a weird group in wax, the light of the dying fire on their yellow faces, and shining athwart their eyes turned toward the darkness whence might come the unknown and the terrible. ”

“ It was as if fear was a river, and this horde had simply been caught in the torrent, man tumbling over beast, beast over man, as helpless in it as the logs that fall and shoulder grindingly through the gorges of a lumber country. ”

“ Deolda was a fierce and passionate reaction against destiny. It's a queer thing, when you think of it, for a girl to be brought up face to face with the wreck of a tragic passion, to grow up in the house with love's ashes and to see what were lovers turned into an old hag and a cantankerous, one-armed man nagging each other.
My aunt made one more argument. "What makes you get married to any of 'em, Deolda?" ”

“ There is but one drawback. Macaulay imitates some of this prattle in his charming letters to his younger sister, [Pg 127] and there we can accept it without difficulty. But Stella was not Swift’s younger sister. She was a beautiful and clever woman of thirty, when he was in the prime of his powers at forty-four. If Tisdall could have seen the journal he would have ceased to call Swift “unaccountable.” Did all this caressing suggest nothing to Stella? Swift does not write as an avowed lover; Dingley serves as a chaperone even in these intimate confidences ”

“ On the way he passed many things: bleeding men carried by comrades; others making their way grimly, with encrimsoned arms; then the little settlement of the hospital squad; men on the ground everywhere, many in the path; one young captain dying, with great gasps, his body pale blue, and glistening, like the inside of a rabbit's skin. But the voice of the Cuban wood-dove, soft, mellow, sweet, singing only of love, was no longer heard from the wealth of foliage. ”

“ Love for such a being is the 'transcendent and surpassing offspring of sheer and unpolluted sympathy.' It is a rapture and a madness; it is to the feelings of the ordinary mortal what sunlight is to moonlight, or wine to water. What wonder that Armine, 'pale and trembling, withdrew a few paces from the overwhelming spectacle, and leant against a tree in a chaos of emotion? ”

“ Maestro Pane rapped on the table and talked to himself in a loud voice. Efès and Nanna reeled and stuttered. The ragged children played with the dogs, and the cats, and the chickens, and the baby pigs. The women squabbled. The young men sang melancholy love songs in the serene moonlit nights. Rebecca's lament shook the air like the cry of the cuckoo across the sadness of a barren landscape. As the sun sometimes shines out from an unexpected quarter of a cloudy sky, so the florid figure of Signor Carboni sometimes appeared in this district of dismal poverty. ”

“ Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul, for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it.” She thinks him changed, and entreats him not to suffer her to “live a life like a languishing death, which is the only life I can lead, if you have lost any of your tenderness for me.” ”

“ He was in love—not with an external object, but with love itself; he formed out of his passionate longings those beautiful, unreal, highstrung beings, whose ecstasies and agonies kept fine ladies sitting up all night in forgetfulness of balls and assemblies, and which now, alas! have faded, as unreal things are apt to fade, and become rather wearisome and slightly absurd. Facts revenge themselves upon the man who denies their existence; and poor Rousseau did not escape the inevitable Nemesis. ”

“ The blizzard began to swirl great clouds of snow along the streets, sweeping it down from the roofs, and up from the pavements, until the faces of pedestrians tingled and burned as from a thousand needle-prickings. Those on the walks huddled their necks closely in the collars of their coats, and went along stooping like a race of aged people. ”

“ Eccentricity Lord Dudley had inherited from his father, and perhaps from his mother, who in her later days was intemperate. He was always shy, but as he grew older his manner became noticeably strange. He was given to soliloquies—a habit said to have been caught from Dugald Stewart—and as he rehearsed to himself what he was going to say to others in two voices, a gruff and a shrill one (Moore, Memoirs, iv. 87) , it was said, ‘It is only Dudley talking to Ward.’ His absence of mind, even when entertaining friends, as he constantly did, gave rise to numberless stories. ”

“ I told her that I loved her as I had never thought that a man could love a woman; I told her that I longed to shield her and protect her, and above all things to remove her from the clutches of that bestial Colonel, and as I bent over her and felt my senses swim in the subtleties of her perfume, I begged her passionately to say the word that would give me the right to fight the world on her behalf. ”

“ ‘You’re brave and strong-limbed, but I want you to be wise—I want you to be wise for your own sake, Stephen, because at the best life requires great wisdom. I want you to learn to make friends of your books; some day you may need them, because—’ He hesitated, ‘because you mayn’t find life at all easy, we none of us do, and books are good friends. ”

“ When at last the Foundling was steaming for the open over the grey sea at dawn, there was not a man of the forty come aboard from the Florida shore, nor of the fifteen sailed from Boston, who was not glad, standing with his hair matted to his forehead with sweat, smiling at the broad wake of the Foundling and the dim streak on the horizon which was Florida. ”

“ Johnnie viewed the grassy fields always as a prospective battle-ground, and one can see him lying there, filling the landscape with visions of slow-crawling black infantry columns, galloping batteries of artillery, streaks of faint blue smoke marking the modern firing lines, clouds of dust, a vision of ten thousand tragedies. ”