I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

The line expresses suspicion toward grand, abstract language—“big words” that can inflate emotions, harden positions, or impose moral and ideological burdens. Read in a Joycean key, it suggests that unhappiness often comes not from immediate experience but from the heavy conceptual labels we attach to it: honor, duty, sin, nation, destiny, and similar rhetorical magnifiers. The speaker’s “fear” implies that such language is not merely misleading but psychologically coercive, capable of trapping people in narratives that intensify suffering. It also gestures toward Joyce’s broader artistic interest in stripping away cant and cliché to recover the texture of lived feeling beneath public, overbearing vocabularies.