Lady Gregory Quotes
Irish - Dramatist March 15, 1852 - May 22, 1932



To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade.
Lady Gregory

Everything that is bad, the falling sickness - God save the mark - or the like, should be at its worst at the full moon. I suppose because it is the leader of the stars.
Lady Gregory

I hold that the beginning of modern Irish drama was in the winter of 1898, at a school feast at Coole, when Douglas Hyde and Miss Norma Borthwick acted in Irish in a Punch and Judy show; and the delighted children went back to tell their parents what grand curses 'An Craoibhin' had put on the baby and the policeman.
Lady Gregory

Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible.
Lady Gregory

It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't.
Lady Gregory

There's too many sounds in the world! The sounds of the earth are terrible! The roots squeezing and jostling one another through the clefts, and the crashing of the acorn from the oak. The cry of the little birdeen in under the silence of the hawk!
Lady Gregory

It was in a mist the Tuatha de Danaan, the people of the gods of Dana, or as some called them, the Men of Dea, came through the air and the high air to Ireland.
Lady Gregory

Every day in the year there comes some malice into the world, and where it comes from is no good place.
Lady Gregory

It is what the poets of Ireland used to be saying, that every brave man, good at fighting, and every man that could do great deeds and not be making much talk about them, was of the Sons of the Gael; and that every skilled man that had music and that did enchantments secretly, was of the Tuatha de Danaan.
Lady Gregory

Many a poor soul has had to suffer from the weight of the debts on him, finding no rest or peace after death.
Lady Gregory

There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth.
Lady Gregory

It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.
Lady Gregory

Well, there's no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth.
Lady Gregory

Every trick is an old one, but with a change of players, a change of dress, it comes out as new as before.
Lady Gregory

From the sons of Ith, the first of the Gael to get his death in Ireland, there came in the after time Fathadh Canaan, that got the sway over the whole world from the rising to the setting sun, and that took hostages of the streams and the birds and the languages.
Lady Gregory

Our curses on them that boil the eggs too hard! What use is an egg that is hard to any person on earth?
Lady Gregory

My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the snow in trenches. And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad management, they could not get it.
Lady Gregory

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.
Lady Gregory

The way most people fail is in not keeping up the heart.
Lady Gregory

We would not give up our own country - Ireland - if we were to get the whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it.
Lady Gregory

There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words, too.
Lady Gregory

Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
Lady Gregory

Napoleon the Third was not much. He died in England, and was buried in a country church-yard much the same as Kiltartan. But Napoleon the First was a great man; it was given out of him there never would be so great a man again.
Lady Gregory

In my childhood there was every year at my old home, Roxborough, or, as it is called in Irish, Cregroostha, a great sheep-shearing that lasted many days. On the last evening there was always a dance for the shearers and their helpers, and two pipers used to sit on chairs placed on a corn-bin to make music for the dance.
Lady Gregory

The time the moon is going back, the blood that is in a person does be weakening, but when the moon is strong, the blood that moves strong in the same way. And it to be at the full, it drags the wits along with it, the same as it drags the tide.
Lady Gregory

It takes madness to find out madness.
Lady Gregory