Eavan Boland Quotes

Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you.

Birth and death; we all move between these two unknowns.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree.

I wonder what day I shall die on - one passes year by year over one's death day, as one might pass over one's grave.

All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.

We are all the foolishness and all the crimes we did. We're also all the kindnesses we did. I hate to think of life as if we understood time. We don't understand time.

Time is the king of all men, he is their parent and their grave, and gives them what he will and not what they crave.

Among all the vicissitudes of life, which vary in each individual's experience, there is one event which sooner or later comes to everyone - Death!

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

All rivers, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their course, all rivers go down to the ocean and drown. And life awaits man as the sea awaits the river.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

You can't be scared of death. When that time comes, it comes.

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

The world rolls round forever like a mill; it grinds out death and life and good and ill; it has no purpose, heart or mind or will.

By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.