John Millington Synge Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.

John Millington Synge
Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.

John Millington Synge
What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?

John Millington Synge
A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.

John Millington Synge
The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.

John Millington Synge
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.

John Millington Synge
Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law.

John Millington Synge
It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went to sea.

John Millington Synge
At first I threw my weight upon my heels, as one does naturally in a boot, and was a good deal bruised, but after a few hours I learned the natural walk of man, and could follow my guide in any portion of the island.

John Millington Synge
The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind.

John Millington Synge
A low line of shore was visible at first on the right between the movement of the waves and fog, but when we came further it was lost sight of, and nothing could be seen but the mist curling in the rigging, and a small circle of foam.

John Millington Synge
It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

John Millington Synge
May I meet him with one tooth and it aching, and one eye to be seeing seven and seventy divils in the twists of the road, and one old timber leg on him to limp into the scalding grave. There he is now crossing the strands, and that the Lord God would send a high wave to wash him from the world.

John Millington Synge
They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me.

John Millington Synge
They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.

John Millington Synge
Some dreams I have had in this cottage seem to give strength to the opinion that there is a psychic memory attached to certain neighbourhoods.

John Millington Synge
Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

John Millington Synge
A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.

John Millington Synge
I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

John Millington Synge
In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation—and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.

John Millington Synge
The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.

John Millington Synge
I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,
The gray and wintry sides of many glens,
And did but half remember human words,
In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.

John Millington Synge
Lord, confound this surly sister,
Blight her brow with blotch and blister,
Cramp her larynx, lung and liver,
In her guts a galling give her.

John Millington Synge
When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen... I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.

John Millington Synge
I asked if I got sick and died, would you
With my black funeral go walking too,
If you'd stand close to hear them talk or pray
While I'm let down in that steep bank of clay.

John Millington Synge
These are rotten, so you're the Queen
Of all are living, or have been.

John Millington Synge
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

John Millington Synge
As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

John Millington Synge
Oh my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World.

John Millington Synge