A Quote from James Joyce

I know it's been a while. To say that I have been busy is an understatement.

Anyway, something blog-worthy is my amazement at this paragraph from a chapter of great book I am reading, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

It was strange too that he found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences only to hear and feel the more deeply his own condemnation. The sentence of saint James which says that he who offends against one commandment becomes guilty of all, had seemed to him first a swollen phrase until he had begun to grope in the darkness of his own state. From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness In using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.

These words seem to come from deep within the writer; indeed, this book is based on his real life experiences. I stared at the paragraph and read it again and again. Such truth. Such a magnificent way of stating the truth.