His father and mother had walked where he would walk as a young man, drifter and dreamer, who would in his fiction delineate each footstep, each bird call, each oval of sand wet or dry, the seaweed emerald and olive, set them down in a mirage of language that was at once real and transubstantiating and would forever be known as Joyce’s Dublin. His pride in this was such that he said if the Dublin of his time were to be destroyed it could be reconstructed from his works
–Edna O’Brien, James Joyce: A Life, 2
