John Millington Synge Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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