{EN} A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

1. „What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a walk; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God.”

2. „(…) he ran across the road and began to walk at breakneck speed down the hill. He hardly knew where he was walking. Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. He strode down the hill amid the tumult of sudden-risen vapours wounded prode and fallen hope and baffled desire. They streamed upwards before his anguished eyes in dense and maddening fumes and passed away above him till at last the air was clean and cold again.”

3. „What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction? A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he knew it was in God’s power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. His pride in his own sin, his loveless awe of God, told him that his offence was too grievous to be atoned for in whole or in part by a false homeage to the All-seeing and All-knowing.”

4. „The stoud student who stood below them on the steps farted briefly. Dixon turned towards him, saying in a soft voice:
– Did an angel speak?”

5. „Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, this bloody beating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.”

6. „ – Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning. (…) You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.
Cranly, now grave again, slowed his pace and said:
– Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what the word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.
– I will take the risk, said Stephen.
– And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.

7. „The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.”

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