35 Important Lines: Riders to the Sea
The young priest says he's known the like of it.
Nora
He won't go this day with the wind rising from the south and west.
Maurya
Is there enough timber for a coffin?
Cathleen
He won't go today, for the young priest will stop him surely.
Nora
She's lying down, God help her, and may be sleeping, if she's able.
Cathleen
I'll have no call now to be going down. For I wouldn't know where to find the horses.
You'd do right to leave that rope, Bartley, hanging by the boards.
Maurya
It's the life of a young man to be going on the sea.
Cathleen
What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?
Maurya
The blessing of God on you.
He's gone now, God spare us, and we'll not see him again.
Maurya
It's little the like of him [the priest] knows of the sea.
Maurya
Give her the stick, Nora, or maybe she'll slip on the big stones.
Cathleen
It's the second one of the third pair I knitted, and I put up three score stitches, and I dropped four of them.
Nora
It's a pitiful thing when there is nothing left of a man... but a bit of an old shirt and a plain stocking.
Nora
I seen the fearfulest thing any person has seen.
Maurya
The gray pony behind him.
Maurya
It's Michael, Cathleen, it's Michael; God spare his soul.
Nora
There were two women, and they rowing around with weed.
Woman
They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me.
Maurya
I've had a husband, and a husband's father, and six sons in this house.
Maurya
I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south.
Maurya
It's a great rest I'll have now, and great sleeping in the long nights.
Maurya
It's a hard thing they'll be saying below if the body is washed up and there's no man in it to make the coffin.
Maurya
Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God.
Maurya
Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards.
Maurya
No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.
Maurya
And it's destroyed he'll be surely... there's no sense left in any person in a house where an old woman will be talking forever.
Nora
In the big world the old people do be leaving things after them... but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things.
Maurya
The gray pony knocked him into the sea, and he was washed out where there is a great surf on the white rocks.
Woman
It's hard set his own mother would be to say what man was in it.
Maurya
May the Almighty God have mercy on Bartley's soul.
Maurya
There isn't a wreck yet so stir... but the rocks.
Maurya
It is the hard father you were to us, my son, Michael, and a hard mother to you.
Cathleen
Wait, Nora, maybe she'd turn back quickly.
Cathleen
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