My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the snow in trenches. And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad management, they could not get it.

It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don’t.

I don’t know in the world why anyone would consent to be a king, and never to be left to himself, but to be worried and wearied and interfered with from dark to daybreak and from morning to the fall of night.

It’s a grand thing to be able to take your money in your hand and to think no more of it when it slips away from you than you would a trout that would slip back into the stream.

Well, there’s no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth.

What are prophecies? Don’t we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.

I’ll take no charity! What I get I’ll earn by taking it. I would feel no pleasure it being given to me, any more than a huntsman would take pleasure being made a present of a dead fox, in place of getting a run across country after it.

What the Danes left in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the morning, the country people will always say ‘It is for Denmark they are crowing. Crowing they are to be back in Denmark.’

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.

The first play I wrote was called ‘Twenty-five.’ It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America.