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Who really said it

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home

Written by James Joyce 1882–1941 · Irish novelist
Verified Free to reuse

This exact line appears in Leopold Bloom’s interior monologue near the end of the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses (1922) — confirmed directly against the novel’s text.

Last verified 8 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home” James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

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Provenance

The source

Work
Ulysses
Episode
13 — “Nausicaa”
First published
2 February 1922, Paris (Shakespeare and Company)
Speaker
Leopold Bloom (interior monologue)

So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she. Circus horse walking in a ring.

Popular quotations of this line usually clip it down to just the two sentences given, dropping the surrounding fragments of Bloom's stream of consciousness.

Ulysses, Episode 13 (Nausicaa) — Standard Ebooks

How we verified this

Public domain

Ulysses was first published in 1922 and has been in the U.S. public domain since 2019 under the 95-year rule; the full text is freely available from multiple archives.

Context

Where it comes from

This meditation on cyclical return comes from the final stretch of the “Nausicaa” episode, as Leopold Bloom sits alone on Sandymount Strand after Gerty MacDowell has gone, his mind drifting through memories of Molly, old friends at Dolphin’s Barn, and the sense that life’s paths curve back on themselves — “returning not the same,” as the passage puts it just before.

“Nausicaa” is also the episode that made Ulysses notorious: its serialization in The Little Review triggered a 1921 U.S. obscenity prosecution that kept the complete novel banned in America until a 1933 court ruling cleared it for publication.

So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself.

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“So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she. Circus horse walking in a ring.”

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More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Wisdom Growth

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Ulysses — full text, Episode 13 (Nausicaa)standardebooks.org

Free, carefully-proofed edition containing the exact passage with this line
Ulysses — Project Gutenberg editiongutenberg.org

Public-domain ebook and publication details for the 1922 novel
James Joyceen.wikipedia.org

Biography, life dates, and overview of his major works
Nausicaa episode guideulyssesguide.com

Scene-by-scene guide to the episode, including Bloom's closing interior monologue

About the author

James Joyce

James Joyce

1882–1941 · Irish novelist, poet & literary critic

James Joyce was an Irish modernist writer best known for Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and his 1922 novel Ulysses, widely regarded as one of the most important works of 20th-century literature. He spent most of his adult life in continental Europe, writing obsessively about the Dublin he had left behind.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922.

MLA (9th ed.)

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Shakespeare and Company, 1922.

APA (7th ed.)

Joyce, J. (1922). Ulysses. Shakespeare and Company.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/think-youre-escaping-and-run-into-yourself-longest-way

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