The Project Gutenberg Project

It was a mild sunny morning in the first week of June. I sat up on the coping of the bridge admiring my frail canvas shoes which I had diligently pipeclayed overnight and watching the docile horses pulling a tramload of business people up the hill. All the branches of the tall trees which lined the mall were gay with little light green leaves and the sunlight slanted through them on to the water. The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy.

- James Joyce, ‘An Encounter’ from Dubliners (1914)  [full text]

Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money. These were three good reasons for Jimmy’s excitement.

- James Joyce, ‘After the Race’ from Dubliners (1914)  [full text]

PEGEEN. I’m thinking you’re too fine for the like of me, Shawn Keogh of Killakeen, and let you go off till you’d find a radiant lady with droves of bullocks on the plains of Meath, and herself bedizened in the diamond jewelleries of Pharaoh’s ma. That’d be your match, Shaneen. So God save you now!

- J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (1907) [full text]

[See also.]

FINTAIN: Well, forget it again, and I will tell you about Aoife’s country. It is full of wonders. There are a great many Queens there who can change themselves into wolves and into swine and into white hares, and when they are in their own shapes they are stronger than almost any man; and there are young men there who have cat’s eyes and if a bird chirrup or a mouse squeak they cannot keep them shut even though it is bedtime and they sleepy; and listen, for this is a great wonder, a very great wonder, there is a long narrow bridge, and when anybody goes to cross it, that the Queens do not like, it flies up as this bench would if you were to sit on the end of it. Everybody who goes there to learn skill 44 in arms has to cross it. It was in that country too that Cuchullain got his spear made out of dragon bones. There were two dragons fighting in the foam of the sea, & their grandam was the moon, and six Queens came along the shore.

- W.B. Yeats, ‘On Baile’s Strand: A Play’ in In the Seven Woods (1903) [full text]

[See also.]

At the first word that falls from him it is clear that he is an Irishman whose native intonation has clung to him through many changes of place and rank. One can only guess that the original material of his speech was perhaps the surly Kerry brogue; but the degradation of speech that occurs in London, Glasgow, Dublin and big cities generally has been at work on it so long that nobody but an arrant cockney would dream of calling it a brogue now; for its music is almost gone, though its surliness is still perceptible.

- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) [full text]

He could scarcely recognize as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:

—I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.

- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917) [full text]

In a few days more an anonymous green parrot arrived, in a gilt cage, with a little note in a clerk’s hand, addressed to ‘Miss Ruthyn (of Knowl), Bartram-Haugh,’ &c. It contained only ‘Directions for caring green parrot,’ at the close of which, underlined, the words appeared—’The bird’s name is Maud.’

- J.S. LeFanu, Uncle Silas (1899) [full text]