On Jimmy Joyce

This belongs on my book blog, but i don't give a fuck.
Here are some great words from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

"The hour when he too would take part in the life of that world seemed drawing near and in secret he began to make ready for the great part which he felt awaited him the nature of which he only dimly apprehended."

"The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet."

"By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him."

"He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered of of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death, but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe!"

"'Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless...?'"
(^that's a Shelley poem that Joyce integrated into the book, I love it).

"To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples."

"His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders."

"He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world."

"This was the call of life to his soul, not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar."

"There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth."

"His thinking was a dusk of doubt and semitrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire consumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in reverie at least he had been acquanted with nobility."

"The ivy whines upon the wall,
And whines and twines upon the wall,
The yellow ivy upon the wall,
Ivy, ivy up the wall."

"Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates."
(An orator summarizes, poets vary their verses.)

"It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture and that the monkish learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry."