Patrick Kavanagh Life Quotations

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.

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.

How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his life.

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

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.

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

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.