Patrick Kavanagh Quotes

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

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

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

Malice is only another name for mediocrity.

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

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.

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.

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

I dabbled in verse and it became my life

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)

What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true.

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.

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