Daily Inspiration Quote by George Farquhar

Farquhar’s speaker isn’t politely asking for permission to feel; he’s threatening an explosion if the room won’t make space for it. “Grant me” has the tone of a formal petition, the kind you’d use to request a favor from a superior. Then comes the swerve: what’s being requested is not money or mercy but “wild expressions,” the very thing polite society trains you to suppress. The line stages a tug-of-war between decorum and bodily urgency, with “burst” landing like a comic-macabre pressure valve: emotion as physics, manners as a dangerous container.

The appeal to “Heavens” is doing double duty. It’s an oath and an audience, a quick way to inflate private feeling into cosmic stakes. In Restoration and early-18th-century theatre, that melodramatic altitude is part of the joke and part of the charge. Farquhar wrote in a comic tradition that loves exposing how “reason” is often just a costume, while desire keeps grabbing the spotlight. The word “wild” signals both freedom and social risk: to be wild is to be alive, but also to be legible as unstable, vulgar, or unfeminine/unchivalrous depending on who’s speaking.

Subtextually, the line flatters the audience’s appetite for spectacle while winking at it. We come to the playhouse to watch people lose control; Farquhar hands us a character who openly demands the license to perform that loss of control. It’s a meta-theatrical plea: let me emote extravagantly, because that’s the contract of comedy and the only honest response to a world that pretends it isn’t ridiculous.