Quotes by 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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“A translation is no translation,’ he said, ‘unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.”

“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 p...”

“What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?”

“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.”

“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 n...”

“I’m a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.”

“I asked if I got sick and died, would youWith my black funeral go walking too,If you’d stand close to hear them talk or prayWhile I’m let down in that steep bank of clay.”

“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.”

“These are rotten, so you’re the QueenOf all are living, or have been.”

“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 bein...”

“In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.”

“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 ...”

“They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.”

“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 th...”

“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.”