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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”