Synge Quotes

#1. And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place ...

William Butler Yeats

#2. John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

William Butler Yeats

#3. He eyed in the far corner of the room the carton of books they'd schlepped across the pond(ocean) They were both fearful of being stuck without a decent book, and who knew they would find everything from Virgil to Synge on the shelves of a fishing lodge?

Jan Karon

#4. PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD AND RIDERS TO THE SEA, J. M. Synge. 80pp. 0-486-27562-0 THE

Mark Twain

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. A young girl must have her lover in all courses of the sun and moon.

J.M. Synge

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

John Millington Synge

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

John Millington Synge

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

John Millington Synge

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

John Millington Synge

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

John Millington Synge

#23. Isn't there the light of seven heavens in your heart alone, the way you'll be an angel's lamp to me from this out, and I abroad in the darkness, spearing salmons in the Owen, or the Carrowmore?

J.M. Synge

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.

J.M. Synge

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

John Millington Synge

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

John Millington Synge

#29. 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

#30. The northern ocean is beautiful, ... and beautiful the delicate intricacy of the snowflake before it melts and perishes, but such beauties are as nothing to him who delights in numbers, spurning alike the wild irrationality of life and baffling complexity of nature's laws.

John Lighton Synge

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

John Millington Synge

#32. 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

#33. I'll say, a strange man is a marvel, with his mighty talk; but what's a squabble in your back yard, and the blow of a loy, have taught me that there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed.

J.M. Synge

#34. 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

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

John Millington Synge

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

John Millington Synge

#39. ...drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart...

J.M. Synge