Extractss from “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”: l 

l  “… He still tried to find the right answer. Was it right to kiss his mother or was it wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother puts her face down. That was to kiss. Her mother puts her lips on his cheek: her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces.” l

     l  “What was after the universe? Nothing. But was it anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?” l 

l  “He tried to think about … but he could think only of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God, and that is 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 was different names for God in all different languages, still God remained always the same God, and God’s real name was God.” l 

l  “It would be lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smoking turf, in the dark lit by the fire, in the warm dark, breathing the smell of the peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy.” L 

These were some selections from the episodical novel “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce. All the sentences selected are from the first chapter of the book, my favorite chapter, in which we have the childhood of Stephen, the protagonist of the novel. L