Eavan Boland Quotes & Sayings

As soon as I take down her book and open it ... My skies rise higher and hang younger stars. — Eavan Boland

If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. — Eavan Boland

Love will heal
What language fails to know — Eavan Boland

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

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

Child of our time, our times have robbed your cradle. Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken. — Eavan Boland

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life. — Eavan Boland

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

Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it. — Eavan Boland

I began to watch places with an interest so exact it might have been memory. There was that street corner, with the small newsagent which sold copies of the Irish Independent and honeycomb toffee in summer. I could imagine myself there, a child of nine, buying peppermints and walking back down by the canal, the lock brown and splintered as ever, and boys diving from it.
It became a powerful impulse, a slow intense reconstruction of a childhood which had never happened. A fragrance or a trick of light was enough. Or a house I entered which I wanted not just to appreciate but to remember, and then I would begin. — Eavan Boland