John Millington Synge Quotes & Sayings

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

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

All the rare and royal names
Wormy sheepskin yet retains — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal. — John Millington Synge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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