John Millington Synge Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.

John Millington Synge

#4. The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.

John Millington Synge

#5. 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

#6. All the rare and royal names
Wormy sheepskin yet retains

John Millington Synge

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. Words, particularly in a play, should have the texture of a crisp, autumn apple.

John Millington Synge

#10. 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

#11. The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal, while the general simplicity of their lives has given them many other points of physical perfection.

John Millington Synge

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

John Millington Synge

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

John Millington Synge

#14. Of the things which nourish the imagination, humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it.

John Millington Synge

#15. 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

#16. 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 servent girls in the kitchen.

John Millington Synge

#17. Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

John Millington Synge

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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.

John Millington Synge

#21. What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?

John Millington Synge

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. No man at all can be living forever and we must be satisfied.

John Millington Synge

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.

John Millington Synge

#29. 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