Patrick Kavanagh Quotes & Sayings

It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities - life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked. — Patrick Kavanagh

A sweeping statement is the only statement worth listening to. The critic without faith gives balanced opinions, usually about second-rate writers. — Patrick Kavanagh

Among your earthiest words, the angels stray... — Patrick Kavanagh

How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his life. — Patrick Kavanagh

Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness. Men and women in rural communities can be compared to a spring that rises out of a rock and spreads in irregular ever-widening circles. But the general principle is static. — Patrick Kavanagh

God cannot catch us. Unless we stay in the unconscious room. Of our hearts. — Patrick Kavanagh

There is nothing as dead and as damned as an important thing. The things that really matter are casual, insignificant little things. — Patrick Kavanagh

The keynote of simple folk is bad manners, familiarity. They intrude on one's private soul. — Patrick Kavanagh

What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true. — Patrick Kavanagh

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom. — Patrick Kavanagh

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman. — Patrick Kavanagh

Death was in the atmosphere. Only the yellow weeds in the meadow were excited by living. — Patrick Kavanagh

Life was too heavy on her feet in that place to leap dramatically when something apparently exciting happened. — Patrick Kavanagh

Malice is only another name for mediocrity. — Patrick Kavanagh

Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour. — Patrick Kavanagh

Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie. — Patrick Kavanagh

He was in his secret room in the heart now. Having entered he could be bold. A man hasn't to be on his best behavior in Heaven; he can kick the furniture around. He can stoop down and picks up lumps of mortality without being born again to die. — Patrick Kavanagh

A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but could not belong. — Patrick Kavanagh

Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast ... Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published. — Patrick Kavanagh

I want to reveal in a simple way the usual - and unusual - life of the city; the corporation workman, the busmen, policemen, the civil servants, the theatres, Moore Street and also, what occupies so large a place in Dublin's life, the literary and artistic. — Patrick Kavanagh

Publication there [in Nimbus] was to prove a turning point ... The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems (1964) — Patrick Kavanagh

In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief. — Patrick Kavanagh

The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse. — Patrick Kavanagh

He read me Whitman, of whom he was very fond, and also Emerson.
I didn't like Whitman, and said so. I always thought him a writer who tried to bully his way to prophecy. Of Emerson at the time I had no opinions to offer. I found him out later to be a sugary humbug. His transcendental bunkum sickened me. — Patrick Kavanagh

We are not alone in our loneliness, others have been here and known griefs we thought our special own ... — Patrick Kavanagh

Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb. — Patrick Kavanagh

Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance. — Patrick Kavanagh

My advice is this, do whatever pleases yourself. These things don't matter. What does matter is that if you have anything worth while in you, any talent, you should deliver it. Nothing must turn you from that. — Patrick Kavanagh

Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially. — Patrick Kavanagh

Ay - 'The Green Fool' business, the libel action over the head of it - did me a lot of damage. It destroyed the momentum. — Patrick Kavanagh

Publicity's a cancer. It eats out a man - till there's nothing but a shell left. — Patrick Kavanagh

Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything. — Patrick Kavanagh

Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. A provincial is always trying to live by other people's loves, but a parochial is self-sufficient. — Patrick Kavanagh

Women, never have got full credit for thei bravery, they sacrifice everything to life — Patrick Kavanagh

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply. — Patrick Kavanagh

Wine and women do not go with song. Alcohol is the worst enemy of the imagination. — Patrick Kavanagh

It often occurs to me that we love most what makes us miserable. In my opinion the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned. — Patrick Kavanagh

The sun rose and set in a land of dreams whether the clocks where right or wrong. — Patrick Kavanagh

In the country places of Ireland, writing is held in certain awe: a writer was a dangerous man from whom they instinctively recoiled. — Patrick Kavanagh

I dabbled in verse and it became my life — Patrick Kavanagh

The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard. — Patrick Kavanagh

A man is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men. — Patrick Kavanagh

My chin is weak. I find it hard to make decisions. For years I had been caught between the two stools of security on the land and rich-scented life on the exotic islands of literature.
I wasn't really a writer. I had seen a strange beautiful light on the hills and that was all. — Patrick Kavanagh