Laura Riding Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.

Laura Riding
I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.

Laura Riding
If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Laura Riding
The sciences that purport to treat of human things — the new scientific storyings of the social, the political, the racial or ethnic, and the psychic, nature of human beings — treat not of human things but mere things, things that make up the physical, or circumstantial, content of human life but are not of the stuff of humanity, have not the human essence in them.

Laura Riding
Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.

Laura Riding
Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

Laura Riding
Conversation succeeds conversation, Until there's nothing left to talk about Except truth, the perennial monologue, And no talker to dispute it but itself.

Laura Riding
Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.

Laura Riding
Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

Laura Riding
Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep.

Laura Riding
... poets are sensitive to the challenge 'What is the moral justification of poetry?' because they are conscious of the intrinsic goodness of poetry. Goody-goody humanitarian causes draw them easily into membership by making them wince at the notion of all the injustices prevalent in the world of physical consciousness. Let it be declared as clearly as possible that the goodness of poetry is not moral goodness, the goodness of temporal action, but the goodness of thought, the loving exercise of the will in the pursuit of truth.

Laura Riding
Metaphor... is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.

Laura Riding
Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble uses. She thus has for him a double, contradictory significance; she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance.

Laura Riding
The anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living poets. They will either write toward the anthology or away from it. Anti-anthology poets often overreach themselves, inflicting protective distortions on their work - as parents in old Central Europe often deliberately maimed their sons to save them from compulsory military service.

Laura Riding
Rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.

Laura Riding
I think you're right about the difference between the Trojan mind and the Greek mind: the Greeks live in their imaginations while the Trojans always try to see things as they really are. And with some things they do get hold of the truth, and with some things they don't. But, where they don't, they won't have substitutes. That's why their world-outlook is so much smaller than ours. It's concentrated in a few certainties which are far ahead of anything we'll arrive at, but when you have these you feel that the rest is a blank and long to be back in the bigger world again, where there's space and variety and perplexity.

Laura Riding
In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centred in this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader. The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was replaced by science; inspiration by psychology.

Laura Riding
The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention – incites a pleasurable compulsion to 'follow' – is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.

Laura Riding
Evil I had never found satisfactorily placeable as an integral element of the universal, or total, content of existence. Indeed, evil is evil just because there is no logical place for it, no room in reality for it. It is unreal, and yet real as something unreal.

Laura Riding
Nature is what you don't have to trouble about. It looks after itself.

Laura Riding
Women, ever since there have been women, have had a way of being people.

Laura Riding
Her one serious failing was that she could not write above love. She could not write a story with more than one important character in it, whom she thought of for the moment as herself; with love there had to be at least two important characters.

Laura Riding
Without dressmakers to connect
The good-will of the body
With the purpose of the head,
We should be two worlds
Instead of a world and its shadow
The flesh.

Laura Riding
Polygamy and polyandry distribute the frightening physical solidarity of monogamy. Monogamous couples are always hungry for company: to dilute sex.

Laura Riding
When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation.... Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.

Laura Riding
If I had my choice to make again - and again and again - it would be Paris, and Paris, and still Paris. And not because I thought him 'the right man', but because I felt him to be my life's task - even if I knew beforehand that this task was doomed to failure. It isn't patience and sweetness of character that does it, but love, and obstinacy - not minding how it turns out. When a woman in love thinks a lot about her future happiness, you can be sure she's not very much in love.

Laura Riding
I would then say that there are two kinds of feeling. The first is to feel in the sense of concentrating your emotions on something immediately available for your understanding: you make your understanding out of the emotions you have about it. The second is to feel in the sense of being affected without trying to understand: something is felt, you do not know what, and it is more important to feel it than to try to understand it, since once you try to understand it you no longer feel it.

Laura Riding
The next world is
As near to this
As time is similar
To truth familiar.

Laura Riding
Euripides seems to have felt that the dignified perfection of Sophocles could be challenged only by novelty and irresponsibility. The religious conditions of the Dionysian festival kept him within certain bounds... But within the imposed limits Euripides was as profane as he dared to be, making melodrama of the divine realities which his predecessors accepted religiously, using the stage merely as a convenience for popularizing his own eccentric values.

Laura Riding
Their common assumption [communists and left-wing poets] is that every one must stand somewhere politically - and especially the poets, who are under suspicion as unpractical people who shirk the responsibility of taking a stand.

Laura Riding