Some important quotes from ‘Sive’ Act 1 Scene 1

It is important to know some quotes to support any points you want to make about ‘Sive’ and so here is a list of some important ones from Act 1 Scene 1.

‘Am I to be scolded, night and day in my own house? Ah! ’twas a sore day to me my son took you for a wife. What a happy home we had before you came into it! Fitter for you  to be having three or four children put from you at this day of your life.’
Nanna to Mena

‘You have nothing else to do but talk. Saying your prayers you should be, at this hour of your days, instead of cackling with your bad tongue . . . Where was your poor amadawn of a son before I came here? Pulling bogdeal out of the ground with a jinnet, going around like a half-fool with his head hanging by him . . . you give me the puke with your grandeur. Take out your dirty doodeen of a pipe and close your gob on it, woman. I have something else to be doing besides arguing with you.’
Mena to Nanna

‘Out working with a farmer you should be, my girl, instead of getting your head filled with high notions. You’ll come to no good either, like the one that went before you!’
Mena to Sive

‘Some day that pipe will take fire where you have hidden it and you’ll go off in a big black ball of smoke and ashes.’
Mena to Nanna

‘If I do, ’tis my prayer that the wind will blow me in your direction and I’ll have the satisfaction of taking you with me. Aha, you’d burn well, for you’re as dry as the hobs of hell inside you. Every woman of your age in the parish has a child of her own and nothing to show by you.’
Nanna to Mena

‘You are like all the matchmakers: you will make a rose out of a nettle to make a bargain.’
Mena to Thomasheen

‘Isn’t she a bye-child? . . . Tell her you will bell-rag her through the parish if she goes against you. Tell her you will hunt the oul’ woman into the county home. Think of the 200 sovereigns dancing in the heel of your fist. Think of the thick bundle of notes in the shelter of you bosom.’
Thomasheen to Mena

‘Be silky then, be canny! Take her gentle. Let it out to her by degrees. Draw down the man’s name first by way of no harm. You could mention the fine place he have. You could say he would be for the grave within a year or two and that she might pick and choose from the bucks of the parish when he’s gone.’
Thomasheen to Mena

‘Why should that young rip be sent to a convent every day instead of being out earning with a farmer. Good money going on her because her fool of a mother begged on the death-bed to educate her.’
Mena to Thomasheen

‘Aren’t ye in the one bed sleeping? Ye will have yeer own talk. You will come round him aisy. You weren’t born a fool, Mena. I know what it is like in the long long hours of the night. I know what it is to be alone in a house when the only word you will hear is a sigh, the sigh of the fire in the hearth dying, with no human words to warn you. I am a single man. I know what a man have to do who have no woman to lie with him. He have to drink hard, or he have to walk under the black sky when every eye is closed in sleep.’
Thomasheen to Mena

‘Money is the best friend a man ever had.’
Mike to Mena

‘Never! . . . if the sun, moon and stars rained down out of the heavens and split the ground under my feet . . . never! ‘Twill never come to pass while I have the pulse of life in me! What the devil has got into you that you should think of such a thing? Even when I was a boy Seán Dóta was a man. The grave he should be thinking of. What young girl would look a second time at him, a worn, exhausted little lurgadawn of a man.’
Mike to Mena

‘No! No! A million times no! It would sleep with me for the rest of my days. It would be like tossing the white flower of the canavaun on to the manure heap. It is against the grain of my bones, woman. Will you think of it? Think of what it is! Sive and that ‘oul corpse of a man, Seán Dóta!’
Mike to Mena

‘Be careful, let ye, and keep a watch. If ’tis a thing ye’re caught together there’ll be no more peace in his house.’
Nanna to Sive and Liam

‘I’ll wait until the crack of dawn, anyway.’
Liam to Sive

‘I would marry nobody but you, Sive, I love you. How would I marry anybody but you!’
Liam to Sive

‘Like your snake of a cousin loved her mother moryeah and fooled her likewise. Like your snake of a cousin that tricked her mother with the promise of marriage and left her a child with no name.’
Mike to Liam

‘You know as well as I do that he would have married her. You know he went across to England to make a home for her but he was drowned. He never knew she was with child when he left.’
Liam to Mike

‘You will not command the lives and happiness of two people who love each other.’
Liam to Mike

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