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.

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

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.

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

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 …

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

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 servant girls in the kitchen.

These are rotten, so you’re the Queen Of all are living, or have been.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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 …