Love Quote by James Joyce

Desire here isn’t described so much as performed on the page, a headlong rush of consciousness that turns a marriage proposal into a kind of verbal climax. Joyce strips away the polite architecture of dialogue and leaves the raw mechanics: glances that “ask,” questions that barely form, a heart “going like mad,” and the word “yes” repeating until it stops being mere assent and becomes momentum. The syntax refuses to pause because the moment itself refuses to be managed. It’s anti-ceremonial, almost indecently intimate.

In context, this is Molly Bloom’s closing monologue in Ulysses, the famous final paragraph that ends the book not with resolution but with affirmation. The subtext is that “yes” is doing double duty: it’s consent to marriage, sexual consent, consent to memory, consent to the mess of living with another person. Joyce lets the boundaries blur on purpose. The proposal is both tender and bodily; romance is inseparable from pulse, breath, embarrassment, eagerness.

The line also quietly mocks the idea that life-changing decisions arrive as clean, quotable sentences. Molly’s recollection is imperfect, crowded with sensation, driven by rhythm rather than logic. That’s Joyce’s larger intent: to elevate the supposedly trivial (a remembered heartbeat, a look) into the real substance of experience. Ending on “yes” is a stylistic gamble and a philosophical one: not innocence, not certainty, but a fierce willingness to enter the future anyway.