Actually, he says don't tell me . It's a really bad idea for wimpy musician guys like me to want to physically harm jock football players. You'll tell me he was mean to you , and because I'm your friend -he brushes his elbow against my arm -i'll see him at school and feel the need to defend your honor , and an hour later i'll be in the ER getting stiches in my eyebrow or something.
Page 178

We all share a secret , and it makes me feel small in a good way , like I'm part of something bigger - something powerful and magical and so special it can't be explained.
Page 142

Poets need words . Even when I have the right ones , I can never seem to spit them out .
Page 66

This novel has a story, after all. The date is June 16, 1904. The setting is Dublin. And the hero is Leopold Bloom—a devoted husband to his wife Molly, with whom he has one daughter. Jewish by race, Christian by baptism, and atheist by inclination, Bloom is really a believer in reason and science: he is the everyman of the democratic twentieth century. He works in the newspaper world as an advertising salesman. Calmly he goes about his business on this sunny day in June—cooking breakfast, attending a funeral, having lunch, negotiating with a client, sitting on the beach—wandering in Dublin, just as Ulysses once wandered in the Mediterranean during his long journey home.

The difference is that this Ulysses is avoiding his home: for he knows that Molly has an appointment that afternoon with the dapper Blazes Boylan—ostensibly to discuss a singing tour, but probably to consummate their flirtation. And so he pauses in pubs and bars, encountering a cast of kibitzers and schlemiels that includes, in particular, Stephen Dedalus, student of philosophy, with dreams of literary glory, whom the avant-garde reader would remember from A Portrait of the Artist, just as that reader would recognize many characters from Dubliners, Joyce’s collection of short stories.