Lady Gregory
Lady Gregory
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregorywas an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionDramatist
Date of Birth15 March 1852
CountryIreland
There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words, too.
It is not always them that has the most that makes the most show.
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.
Queen Victoria was loyal and true to the Pope; that is what I was told, and so is Edward the Seventh loyal and true, but he has got something contrary in his body.
And my desire,' he said, 'is a desire that is as long as a year; but it is love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.
If the past year were offered me again, And choice of good and ill before me set Would I accept the pleasure with the pain Or dare to wish that we had never met?
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.
Well, there's no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth.
Many a poor soul has had to suffer from the weight of the debts on him, finding no rest or peace after death.
I feel more and more the time wasted that is not spent in Ireland.
Our curses on them that boil the eggs too hard! What use is an egg that is hard to any person on earth?
There is no sin coveting things are of no great use or profit, but would show out good and have some grandeur around them.
What makes Ireland inclined toward the drama is that it's a great country for conversation.
I don't think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don't think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish.