"Art had a disquieting power of producing social embarrassment; it caused people to make silly remarks and then laugh self-consciously, as if the pictures, which knew better, could hear them. It could not be just ignorance; displays of armor and mummies and natural-history exhibits did not have that effect. If you were with art long enough, you began to get the feeling that it was looking right at you."

“Every year I started Ulysses, but I could not get beyond the first chapter — "stately, plump Buck Mulligan" — page 47, I think it was. Then one day, long after, in a different apartment, with a different man , I found myself on page 48 and never looked back. This happened with many of us: Ulysses gradually — but with an effect of suddenness — became accessible. It was because in the interim we had been reading diluted Joyce in writers like Faulkner and so had got used to his ways, at second remove.”

“I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.”

“'Let me out!' 'You want to get out of the car?' said Lakey. 'Yes,' said Harald. 'You bury her. You and the "group."' Lakey stopped the car. He got out. She drove on, following the cortège, watching him in the rear-view mirror as he crossed the road and stood, thumbing a ride, while cars full of returning mourners glided past him, back to New York.”

“What about works of art — the Parthenon — that have always belonged to general realm of onlookers, gods, supposedly, and men? Frescoes on churches and statues standing in public squares. Cathedrals. Skyscrapers. Whoever commissioned them — cardinals or Seagrams or the city fathers — by now they're part of the social fabric. Surely they're art as it was meant to be. Sacred artifacts owned by nobody and by everybody that passes by. A lot of them visible from a long way off. But they can be tucked away in a cloister or even in an oratory shown you by an old nun. The point is, they've become assimilated to whole family of natural objects — mountain ranges, harbors, stands of trees — that have settled down to live with us too. Of course they "do" something for human community; they're pillars holding it up. But also living members. Come to be seen often as protectors, esp. in old cities. Like lares and penates of Roman house. Perhaps represent eternity, on account of remarkable endurance. Anyway they "concentrate the mind wonderfully," as Dr. J. said of hanging.”

“It struck her that Norine's apartment was all too populous with 'significant form.' Every item in it seemed to be saying something, asserting something, pontificating. Norine and Put were surrounded by articles of belief, down to the last can of evaporated milk and the single, monastic pillow on the double bed. It was different from Kay's apartment, where the furniture was only asking to be admired ot talked about. But here, in this dogmatic lair, nothing had been admitted that did not make a 'relevant statement,' though what the polar bear was saying Helena could not make out.”

“From what I have seen, I am driven to the conclusion that religion is only good for good people, and I do not mean this as a paradox, but simply as an observable fact. Only good people can afford to be religious. For the others it is too great a temptation — a temptation to the deadly sins of pride and anger, chiefly, but one might also add sloth.”