John Millington Synge Quotes
April 16, 1871 – March 24, 1909
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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.
The Curse 
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More John Millington Synge Quotes
No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.
John Millington Synge— 1904 Riders to the Sea.
They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me.
John Millington Synge— 1904 Maurya speaking. Riders to the Sea.
Well, if the worst comes in the end of all, it'll be great game to see if there's none to pity him but a widow woman, the like of me, has buried her children and destroyed her man.
John Millington Synge— 1907 Widow Quin.The Playboy of theWesternWorld, act 2.
Oh my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World.
John Millington Synge— 1907 Pegeen Mike.The Playboy of theWesternWorld, act 3, closing words.
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— The Vagrants of Wicklow, written 1901-1902, first published in The Shanachie (Dublin, autumn 1906).
What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?
John Millington Synge— Riders to the Sea (1904)
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— Prelude (1910)
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— Draft of a preface in “Notebook 16”; Quoted in The Collected Works of J.M. Synge, vol. 1, Introduction (1962)
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— Draft of a preface in “Notebook 16”; Quoted in The Collected Works of J.M. Synge, vol. 1, Introduction
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— A Question
These are rotten, so you’re the Queen Of all are living, or have been.
John Millington Synge— Queens
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.
John Millington Synge— The Playboy of the Western World, Preface (1907)
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 now crossing the strands, and that the Lord God would send a high wave to wash him from the world.
John Millington Synge— Act II (The Playboy of the Western World (1907))
They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.
John Millington Synge— Act III (The Playboy of the Western World (1907))
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 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— Pt. I (The Aran Islands (1907))
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— 1907 The Playboy of theWesternWorld, act 2.
I'll say, a strangemanisa marvel, with hismighty 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. 834
John Millington Synge— 1907 Pegeen Mike.The Playboy of theWesternWorld, act 3.
