Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.

A translation is no translation unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.

A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.

What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?

The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind.