Eavan Boland quotes:
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I'm really fortunate to be at Stanford. I go home every 10 weeks, but Stanford apart from being just a wonderful university is one of the places that are part of a great conversation.
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It has always seemed to me a great honor to be called an Irish poet. I don't think I will ever lose that, but it's also a great honor to be a woman poet. I put those things together.
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Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.
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Flesh is heretic. My body is a witch. I am burning it.
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Sleep in a world, your final sleep has woken
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I have always loved American poetry, which is very different from Irish poetry.
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If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
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Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one personĂ¢??s life.
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Love will heal What language fails to know
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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.
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To be an Irish poet after that 19th century in which there was such a struggle toward the light, I think still will always be in the hearts of the writers of my generation and the generations before and hopefully the generations after.
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I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet.
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. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
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The United States' poetry emerged when there was a high literacy rate in the United States, even in the 19th century. People read the poetry when it was written. In Ireland, there was a poor literacy rate and people remember that poetry. That was handed on as a memorial tradition.