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 s…"

"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 …"

"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."

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

"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 r…"

"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 penu…"

"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…"

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