Patrick Kavanagh > Quotes

“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, Tarry Flynn

“We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, The Complete Poems

“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, Tarry Flynn

“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, Tarry Flynn

“To be dead is to stop believing in the masterpieces we will begin tomorrow.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems

“I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
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, The Complete Poems

“A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes and finds that it is his life”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems

“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, The Green Fool

“Among your earthiest words, the angels stray...”
― Patrick Kavanagh

“Death was in the atmosphere. Only the yellow weeds in the meadow were excited by living.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Tarry Flynn

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

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

“Life was too heavy on her feet in that place to leap dramatically when something apparently exciting happened.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Tarry Flynn

“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, The Green Fool

“No one loves you for what you have done, but for what you might do.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems

“He will hardly remember that life happened to him.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger

“No man need be a mediocrity if he accepts himself as God made him. God only makes geniuses. But many men do not like God’s work.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Collected prose

“I saw the danger, yet I passed along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.”
― Patrick Kavanagh

“He was pleasantly hysterical like a young girl at a wedding.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Tarry Flynn

“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”
― Patrick Kavanagh, The Complete Poems

“No poet ever travelled in search of beauty. No poet ever looked at a scene and cried ‘Wonderful’. Memorable beauty comes at us obliquely while we are going about our troubled business. W.H. Davies wrote: What is this life if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare? But Davies was wrong: What is this life if NOT full of care We do not let the cart-tracks stare Into our hearts with love’s despair? This pursuit of beauty is one of the defects of the tourist’s point of view. The tourist is in a hurry; he demands quick returns of the picturesque and the obvious. But for all that, it is possible even when we pursue beauty or happiness to come upon oblique references to it. The job is to recognize them in the hurry. Not everybody can have the fields and lanes stare at him as they stare at a man driving a cow to a fair.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, A Poet's Country: Selected Prose

“And you perhaps take up religion bitterly which you laughed at in your youth, well not actually laughed but it wasn't your kind of truth.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems

“God's truth is life ―even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, La hambruna y otros poemas

“He stands in the doorway of his house
A ragged sculpture of the wind,
October creaks the rotted mattress,
The bedposts fall. No hope. No. No lust.
The hungry fiend
Screams the apocalypse of clay
In every corner of this land.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, La hambruna y otros poemas

“My soul was an old horse
Offered for sale in twenty fairs...
I cried, 'Who will bid me half a crown?'
From their rowdy bargaining
Not one turned. 'Soul,' I prayed,
'I have hawked you through the world
Of Church and State and meanest trade.
But this evening, halter off,
Never again will it go on.
On the south side of ditches
There is grazing of the sun.
No more haggling with the world....'
As I said these words he grew
Wings upon his back. Now I may ride him
Every land my imagination knew.”
― Patrick Kavanagh

“Gather
No moss you rolling stones.
Nothing thought out atones
For no flight
In the light.”
― Patrick Kavanagh

“On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue; I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way, And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day. On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge, The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay – O I loved too much and by such by such is happiness thrown away. I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May. On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay – When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Selected Poems

“On Monday, the cobblers’ holiday, they would go to the nearest pub and drink their week’s wages. I remember a little fellow called Jem Fagan, who used to come home across the hills, shouting with terrific voice the incoherencies of Bacchus. Jem’s Monday-night shouting was familiar to the whole parish. The children used to come out to listen, and children could listen; for, although noisy, none of today’s shocking vulgarisms were part of his drunken eloquence. He had a pair of large brown eyes that blazed in the dark like two little lamps. My father said the devil was standing in him, but it was a good-humoured devil enough.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, A Poet's Country: Selected Prose

“You perhaps take up religion bitterly which you laughes at in your youth, well not actually laughed, but it wasn't your kind of truth.”
― Patrick Kavanagh, Collected Poems