James Joyce

invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,

her arid seas, her silence

her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech

her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown?

Shut your eyes and see.

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

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality;

and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.

We walk through ourselves...