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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Patrick Kavanagh Quotes

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

– 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

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

What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true.

– Patrick Kavanagh

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

– 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

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

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

– Patrick Kavanagh

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

– 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

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

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

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

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

– Patrick Kavanagh

Malice is only another name for mediocrity.

– 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

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

– Patrick Kavanagh

Publicity’s a cancer. It eats out a man – till there’s nothing but a shell left.

– 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

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