Patrick Kavanagh Quotes

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.

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.

We have tested and tasted too much, lover- Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.

I am so glad To come accidentally upon My self at the end of a tortuous road And have learned with surprise that God Unworshipped withers to the Futile One. —PATRICK KAVANAGH, FROM “AUDITORS IN

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

Among your earthiest words, the angels stray...

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.

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

Life was too heavy on her feet in that place to leap dramatically when something apparently exciting happened.

Death was in the atmosphere. Only the yellow weeds in the meadow were excited by living.

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

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.

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.

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.

Agapanthus and peonies in June. Scented stock and sweet peas in July. Sunflowers and sweet William in August. By the time September's oriental lilies and ornamental cabbages appeared, she wasn't hiding upstairs in the workroom anymore. She was spending more time in the shop, answering the phone, dealing with the customers. One Sunday she spent the afternoon at an allotment belonging to a friend of Ciara's, picking lamb's ear and dusty miller and veronica for a wedding, and didn't think about Michael once, but she kept remembering a Patrick Kavanagh poem she'd learned at school, the one about how every old man he saw reminded him of his father.

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

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

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

Gather No moss you rolling stones. Nothing thought out atones For no flight In the light.

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.

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.

And he is not so sure now if his mother was right when she praised the man who made a field his bride.

God's truth is life ―even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.

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.

To be dead is to stop believing in the masterpieces we will begin tomorrow.

No one loves you for what you have done, but for what you might do.

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.

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.

Young fops and lordlings of the garrison Kept up by England here to keep us down . . . And doubtless, as they dash along, regard Us who stand outside as a beggarly crew. ’Tis half-past six. Not yet. No, that’s not he. Well, but ’tis pretty, sure, to see them stoop And take the ball, full gallop . . . Polo was still dominated by British cavalry officers, and the stretch called Nine Acres was seen by militant nationalists to be an offensive appropriation of public land—a little enclave of England—as was the cricket ground. Phoenix Park’s statues—the robed figure in the People’s Garden commemorating an earlier lord lieutenant, the Seventh Earl of Carlisle, as well as the bronze equestrian memorial of the war hero Lord Gough—were further reminders of British rule (both demolished by twentieth-century nationalists). Ferguson’s verses, however, express more than national resentment. The poet, later to be worshipped by the young W. B. Yeats, cannot have known about Patrick Egan’s plan for James Carey, and yet, with remarkable insight, he reveals it: “Lord Mayor for life—why not?” Carey muses,

He will hardly remember that life happened to him.