Patrick Kavanagh Quotes

A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes and finds that it is his life

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

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

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.

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)

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

I find a star-lovely art
In a dark sod.
Joy that is timeless! O heart
That knows God!

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

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.

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.

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.

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

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east;
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon - the Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said:
"Can't he make it talk" -
The melodion, I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade -
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse

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

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

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

He was pleasantly hysterical like a young girl at a wedding.

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.

I dabbled in verse and it became my life

What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true.

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

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.

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

Malice is only another name for mediocrity.

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.

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.

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