Important quotes from ‘Sive’ Act 1 Scene 3

The importance of learning quotes from a play can never be underestimated so here are some of the key quotes from Act 1 Scene 3 to help you along your way.

‘Ah, the back o’ my hand to you for an oul’ hag! There is no good in you – alluding and criticising always. Children bring nothing but misfortune. Didn’t you see your own – the good end they came to. The gall of you, condemning me for my lack of child.’
Mena to Nanna

‘Thanking me from the heart, she should be, the fine match I am making for her. Putting myself out to place her in a gentleman’s house.’
Mena to Nanna, about Sive

‘Dacent poor people with no home of their own. Good friends when they are needed.’
Nanna to Thomasheen and Mena, about Pats and Carthalawn

‘Will ye look at the appearance of them! A short leg and a half-fool! Two with the one word, goin’ around with their songs, frightenin’ half the country. Go on away to yeer smelly caravan and not be disgustin’ respectable people!’
Thomasheen to Pats and Carthalawn

‘The people are saying that it is a strange match that a young girl who is at the start of her days should marry an old man who is at the end of his. They say he is struggling to keep the spark of life inside him. They say she is the flower of the parish.’
Pats to Mena

‘The devil’s work is what it is!’
Nanna to Mena

‘I’m listenin’g to you, Thomasheen Seán Rua and I’m watching you and I’m telling you what you are. You are the bladder of a pig, the snout of a sow; you are the leavings of a hound, the sting of a wasp. You will die roaring. Carthalawn! Your best! Your almighty best!’
Pats to Thomasheen

‘You are a lone woman with your husband feeding worms in his trench. You have terrible gumption with no one to back you.’
Thomasheen to Nanna

‘Little your son cares about you. Long ago you should have been put in your place.’
Mena to Nanna

‘There is a hatchery of sin in this house.’
Nanna to the fire

‘I will strike you. [Full of venom] I will take the head from your shoulders.’
Mena to Nanna

‘Think about the handling of thousands and the fine clothes and perfumery. Think of the hundreds of pounds in creamery cheques that will come in the door to you and the servant boy and the servant girl falling all over you for fear you might dirty your hands with work.’
Mena to Sive

‘Please, please . . . you don’t know what you are saying. How can you ask me such a thing?
Sive to Mena

‘Will you picture yourself off to the chapel every Sunday in your motor car with your head in the air and you giving an odd look out of the window at the  poor oinseachs in their donkey-and-cars and their dirty oul’ shawls and their faces yellow and thin with the dirt by them. Will you thank God that you won’t be for the rest of your days working for the bare bite and sup like the poor women of these parts.’
Mena to Sive

‘It is time you were told, my girl. You are a bye-child, a common bye-child – a bastard!’
Mena to Sive

‘You will sleep with that woman no longer. [She flings the schoolbag across the room.] There will be no more school for you. School is a place for schoolmasters and children. Every woman will come to the age when she will have a mind for a room of her own. I mind when I was a child, when I was a woman, there were four sisters of us in the one room. There was no corner of the bed we could call our own. We used to sit in the night talking and thieving and wondering where the next ha’penny would come from or thinking would it ever come to our turn to meet a boy that we might go with, and be talking with and maybe make a husband out of. We would kill [vexed]. We would beg, borrow or steal. We would fire embers of fire at the devil to leave the misery of our own house behind us, to make a home with a man, any man that would show four walls to us for his time in the world. [In a voice of warning] Take no note of the man who has nothing to show for himself, who will be full of rameish and blather, who would put wings on ould cows for you but has no place to make a marriage bed for you. Take heed  of a man with property. He will stand over his promise. He will keep the good word for you because he has the keeping of words . . . Now go to the room and be sure to think of what I said.’
Mena to Sive