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John Millington Synge

playwright, poet, writer, librettist, prose writer

1871  – 1909

Edmund John Millington Synge, popularly known as J. M. Synge, was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, and collector of folklores. As a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival during the early 20th century, he is widely regarded by critics as one of the most influential dramatists of the Edwardian era, and by several of his peers, among them William Butler Yeats, as the most prolific playwright in Irish literature. Synge had a relatively short career, but his works continue to be held in high regard due to their cultural and literary significance. He was also one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, along with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

All Quotes by 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
“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
“What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?”
— John Millington Synge
“I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.”
— 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
“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
“I asked if I got sick and died, would youWhile I’m let down in that steep bank of clay.”
— John Millington Synge
“Lord, confound this surly sister,In her guts a galling give her.”
— John Millington Synge
“These are rotten, so you’re the QueenOf all are living, or have been.”
— 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
“In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.”
— John Millington Synge
“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
“They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.”
— 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. 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
“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
“There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.”
— 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
“The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind.”
— John Millington Synge