Eavan Boland Quotes

#1. If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

Eavan Boland

#2. Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

Eavan Boland

#3. Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.

Eavan Boland

#4. Child of our time, our times have robbed your cradle. Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

Eavan Boland

#5. I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire - whatever you want to call it - that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening.

Eavan Boland

#6. We love fog because
it shifts old anomalies into the elements
surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

Eavan Boland

#7. As soon as I take down her book and open it ... My skies rise higher and hang younger stars.

Eavan Boland

#8. This is what language is:
a habitual grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this:
which hurts
just enough to be a scar
And heals just enough to be a nation.

Eavan Boland

#9. Love will heal
What language fails to know

Eavan Boland