Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place in 1904, the date of his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom.
The Irish holiday lasts from 8 am June 16th through the early hours of the next morning, the same time that the novel follows the main character Bloom in the year 1904.
Bloomsday celebrations come with festival-goers dressing up like the characters from the time period of the tale. They also wear the traditional straw boater hat that is a major icon for the novel.
People celebrate this 800-plus-page novel through readings, performances, re-enactments, and visiting the places referenced in the novel.
The novel Ulysses was first published in 1922, the first major celebration of Bloomsday followed in 1929. Ireland adopted the holiday in 1954 and it continues today.
Bloomsday Quotes, Messages and Wishes
‘Ulysses’ is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new. – Irvine Welsh
“I still think reading something like ‘Ulysses’ takes a tremendous investment of time, but it repays all of it with so much interest.” – D. B. Weiss
This is the season where we acknowledge and thank James Joyce for the masterpieces he has gifted us long back. Happy Bloomsday.
Get your period costume ready and join the cult in the streets of Dublin on this special day of Bloomsday. Happy Bloomsday.
The time of Bloomsday is finally here and you should get ready to recreate the events from the famous Ulysses today. Happy Bloomsday!
Get your period costume ready and gear up for the epic Bloomsday that is coming your way. Wishing you a happy Bloomsday.
You are finally getting the break you deserve. May this Bloomsday wake up your love for literary works. Wishing you a happy Bloomsday.
It will be a loss if you have not gone through James Joyce’s Ulysses. Give it a good read and take to the streets of Dublin to see the magic. Happy Bloomsday.
Start this day by exploring the Joycean literary pub crawls happening in town and join the academic talks organized across Dublin. Wish you a very happy Bloomsday.
This Bloomsday teach your kids the importance of this day and take them to the theatre enactments of James Joyce’s works. Happy Bloomsday.
Start this special day by wearing your favorite period costume and join the other literary enthusiasts in the streets. Happy Bloomsday.
This is a day to celebrate the works and contributions of the legend and pride of Ireland James Joyce. Wish you a happy Bloomsday.
Boomsday has finally arrived in town and on this day nothing can match up to the soul-soothing theatrical enactments of James Joyce’s works. Happy Bloomsday.
We hardly get time to go through the literary works written down by famous authors because of our hectic schedule. Today let’s dive in them. Happy Bloomsday.
On this special day do not just sit in the house. Head to the theatres and join the enactments of Ulysses performed by artists. Wish you a happy Bloomsday.
This Bloomsday, make sure you take out some time from your daily schedule and join the soul smoothing fun in the streets of Dublin. Wish you a happy Bloomsday.
Many authors will come and go but James Joyce holds a respectable and honorable position in the hearts of the people of Ireland. Wish you a very happy Bloomsday.
Quotes from Ulysses
“Be just before you are generous.”
“We can’t change the world, but we can change the subject.”
“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”
“He laughed to free his mind from his mind’s bondage.”
“You cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.”
“Come what might, she would be wild, untrammeled, free.”
“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
“Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.”
“They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature.”
“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”
“And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn’t probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.”
“Each imagining himself to be the first last and only alone, whereas he is neither first last nor last nor only not alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.”
“The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.”
“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
“Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were a-cracking when M’Carthy took the floor. Heatwave. Won’t last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.”
“Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the storm-tossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.”
“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”
Thanks for the quotes