You know how sometimes you get lines from songs stuck in your head? Not necessarily the music, but the lines themselves. Well I do anyway. Lines like “And still we will be here, standing like statues” or “do you believe in magic?”, though they’re much better with the music to go with them, and when they’re sung in a certain way. Lately I’ve had a few literary lines stuck in my head, two of them from James Joyce, one from Simon Armitage. Sometimes the best sentiments come from the fewest words, and some quotes are brilliant not because of what they say, whether they’re a pithy little aphorism or a well-put piece of rhetoric, but by what they suggest, and how they seem to carry a whole weight of ideas that is much greater than the sum of their parts.

Without further ado in this short, sharp little post, the three lines I have stuck in my head, that I thought I would share are:

i. Yes I said yes I will yes.

This, as everyone really ought to know, is the final, triumphant line of Joyce’s Ulysses. I love the emphatic expression of affirmation it embodies. It’s only seven words, and yet it is so enthusiastic in conveying its message. It’s so well-balanced as well, the way two words separate each of the three yeses. It’s probably even my favourite line in the whole novel.

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(This one’s kind of like Jigsaw Puzzle.)

Collective Student First-Year Dream

I’m terrified.
“You’ll make lots of friends.”
The words sounded hollow. What if school had been a fluke, all my friends until now exceptional people, not like the rest of the world? The words came true though: I made lots of friends.

We watched a film together, she and our friend, huddled on floor cushions, the screen illuminating our faces, a spring breeze through the open window. Our friend fell asleep, and it was like we were alone, alone and complicit when he gurgled in his sleep and we looked at each other. I thought then of putting my arm around her, but I didn’t. Had we been properly alone, then I would.

How many nights had I sat with him in his darkened room watching him play videogames, sharing his pain in each failure, his joy in each success, thinking ‘is this what a relationship is’? I suppose that never crossed his mind: he only had eyes for her.

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