Lady Gregory Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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!”

“I feel more and more the time wasted that is not spent in Ireland.”

“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.”

“The way most people fail is in not keeping up the heart.”

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

“There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth.”

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