remember the poems, and the great stories?. . .

"'Behold, the night is of great length,'" I quoted, "'Unbearable.
Tell us, therefore, of those wondrous deeds.'"

"If you've remembered your Gaidhlig as you've remembered your Greek!"

"It's a long time since you've had a story of me, twelve long years,
and it's a long time before you'll have another, and I going away
tomorrow. Old Sergeant Death has his warrant out for me this many
a day, and it's only the wisdom of an old dog fox that eludes him;
but he'll lay me by the heels one of these days. . .then there'll
be an end to the grand stories. . .So after this, if you're wanting
a story, you must be writing it yourself. . .

"But before I die, I'll leave you the story of Marco Polo. There's
been a power of books written about Marco Polo. The scholars have
pushed up their spectacles and brushed the cobwebs from their ears,
and they've said, 'There's all there is about Marco Polo.'

"But the scholars are a queer and blind people, Brian Oge. I've
heard tell there's a doctor in Spain can weigh the earth. But he
can't plow a furrow that is needful, for planting corn. The scholars
can tell how many are the feathers in a bird's wing, but it takes
me to inform the doctors why the call comes to them, and they fly
over oceans without compass or sextant or sight of land.

"Did you ever see a scholar standing in front of a slip of a girl?
In all his learning he can find nothing to say to her. And every
penny poet in the country knows.