Laura Riding - People Quotes

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Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations, which have all to do with making things already made, is the making of people: it is called the art of friendship.

Laura Riding
She [Venison] had never travelled and so could invent all kinds of strange places without being limited, as travelled people are, by knowledge of certain places only.

Laura Riding
In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else.

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

Laura Riding
You know the story of the famous seer Phineus whom the Argonauts consulted when they stopped in Salmydessos in Thrace on their way to Colchis to get the golden fleece. He was blind, but not entirely blind - he could see just enough to see that he could not see. And the little flickering spots of light that forced themselves on him were wind-harpies trying to steal from him his prophetic power. So he would beg everyone to make him blind, to rid him of the harpies. But people laughed at him because, so far as they could tell, he was as blind as any man needed to be. Only Hercules understood, because his spirit extended into the divine shadows. Only Hercules had the courage to make the blind Phineus blind.

Laura Riding