Four Dubliners: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett Book

Ellmann on Wilde: At Oxford, "he developed a great appetite for formal wear, and told a friend, 'If I were alone on a desert island and had my things, I should dress for dinner every night.'"

Quote Joyce from Portrait on Stephen Dedalus: "I go forth to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." (Joyce thought big.)

On Ulysses: "The reign of order gives way to the reign of chaos. The physical universe, so glancingly built up in all its multiplicity in the early episodes, begins to lose its plausibility. Space and time, once so distinct, are shaken almost of recognition. The reader like the narrative is caught up in the agitations and images of the unconscious mind. Our daytime selves are almost overwhelmed by this night. Yet in all the disorder Joyce keeps as firm a hand as he had when all was order in the early chapters. At the end he gives us back our world, somewhat the worse for wear, based no longer upon primal certitude but upon affirmation in the face of doubt, as the universe hangs upon the voice.

That's as good a gloss on that maddening book as I can recall.