Patrick Kavanagh Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Malice is only another name for mediocrity.

Patrick Kavanagh
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanized scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill—Maguire and his men.

Patrick Kavanagh
That was how his life happened.
No mad hooves galloping in the sky,
But the weak, washy way of true tragedy—
A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.

Patrick Kavanagh
I hate what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

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
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon—the Three Wise Kings.

Patrick Kavanagh
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
Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified: The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field Where the seed gets no chance to come through To the fun of the sun. The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.

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

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

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

Patrick Kavanagh