And my desire,' he said, 'is a desire that is as long as a year; but it is love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.

There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words, too.

It is not always them that has the most that makes the most show.

It takes madness to find out madness.

Everything that is bad, the falling sickness - God save the mark - or the like, should be at its worst at the full moon. I suppose because it is the leader of the stars.

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

In writing a little tragedy, 'The Gaol Gate,' I made the scenario in three lines, 'He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.' I wrote that play very quickly.