Where There Is Nothing: Being Volume I of Plays for an Irish Theatre

“Go on, live in your poultry-yard. Scratch straw and cluck and cackle at everything that you take for a fox. [Exit.””

— W. B. Yeats

“if one writes one can do nothing else.””

— W. B. Yeats

“You have accused me of upsetting order by my free drinks, and I have showed you that there is a more dreadful fermentation in the Sermon on the Mount than in my beer-barrels. Christ thought it in the irresponsibility of His omnipotence.””

— W. B. Yeats

“Mr. Dowler, could you go through this? Mr. Algie. Don't answer him, Dowler; he's going beyond all bounds. Paul Ruttledge. I was a rich man and I could not, and yet I am something smaller than a camel, and this is something larger than a needle's eye.””

— W. B. Yeats

“Jerome. That is a terribly wild thought. I hope you don't believe all you say. Paul Ruttledge. Perhaps not. I only know that I want to upset everything about me. Have you not noticed that it is a complaint many of us have in this country? and whether it comes from love or hate I don't know, they are so mixed together here.””

— W. B. Yeats

“I would like to have great iron claws, and to put them about the pillars, and to pull and pull till everything fell into pieces. Jerome. I don't see what good that would do you. Paul Ruttledge. Oh, yes it would. When everything was pulled down we would have more room to get drunk in, to drink contentedly out of the cup of life, out of the drunken cup of life.””

— W. B. Yeats