Laura Riding Quotes

#1. A child should be allowed to take as long as she needs for knowing everything about herself, which is the same as learning to be herself. Even twenty-five years if necessary, or even forever. And it wouldn't matter if doing things got delayed, because nothing is really important but being oneself.

Laura Riding

#2. The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind ... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

Laura Riding

#3. I met God. 'What,' he said, 'you already?' 'What,' I said, 'you still?

Laura Riding

#4. To tell one comprehensive story of how it has happened that what is is, one which shall hold true, come what may, now-after - a story that whatever comes shall perfectly continue or confirm: such is the ideal motive of religions.

Laura Riding

#5. My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.

Laura Riding

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

Laura Riding

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

Laura Riding

#8. Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.

Laura Riding

#9. Learning can be a bridge between doing and thinking. But then there is a danger that the person who uses learning as a bridge between doing and thinking may get stuck in learning and never get on to thinking ...

Laura Riding

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

Laura Riding

#11. Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

Laura Riding

#12. Every woman must live by some sense of victory over disappointments, and Olympias was not the sort of woman to find compensation in her own powers of self-control and endurance.

Laura Riding

#13. If you find something to tell, tell it to your truest, though that make little to tell; the truer you speak, the more you will know to tell.

Laura Riding

#14. The object of all religious activity is to mingle the human and the non-human, and the lower gods represent that which is cast back to the human from the non-human - human gods merely, practice-gods who embody the errors which man makes in first conceiving the non-human.

Laura Riding

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

Laura Riding

#16. I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.

Laura Riding

#17. 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

#18. The problem of good and evil is not the problem of good and evil, but only the problem of evil. In opposition to good there are evil characters, but there are no good characters in opposition to evil. Evil is arguable, but good is not. Therefore the Devil always wins the argument.

Laura Riding

#19. We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are. We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.

Laura Riding

#20. When ... I comprehended that poetry had no provision in it for ultimate practical attainment of the rightness of work that is truth, but led on ever only to a temporizing less- than-truth ... I stopped.

Laura Riding

#21. People get wisdom from thinking, not from learning ...

Laura Riding

#22. Anger is precious because it is an immediate, undeniable clue to what our minds (so much more cautious in rejection and resistance than our bodies) will not tolerate.

Laura Riding

#23. 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

#24. I am not 'in pursuit of truth.' It is not my 'quarry.' I am of my human nature a thinker, and conscious of need, responsibility of thinking-speaking with truth. I do not go about hunting 'truths.'

Laura Riding

#25. A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time - the telling of what came first and before done forever.

Laura Riding

#26. Whatever is not happening now is unimportant; it is merely curious.

Laura Riding

#27. The terms 'male' and 'female' must be understood as representing no more primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live.

Laura Riding

#28. 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

#29. All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.

Laura Riding

#30. Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.

Laura Riding

#31. Women are strangers in the country of man ...

Laura Riding

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

Laura Riding

#33. Spiritually, the society we have is the society of men with women present only in adjunctive relation to them, not the society of men and women in reciprocal relation. We do not have the society of human beings.

Laura Riding

#34. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Laura Riding

#35. Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.

Laura Riding

#36. Woman has two works to perform: a work of differentiation, of man from herself, and a work of unification, of man with herself ... We, woman, are now entering upon our second work.

Laura Riding

#37. To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

Laura Riding

#38. 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

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

Laura Riding

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

Laura Riding

#41. 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

#42. What second love could she [Olympias] make out of her ruined first love? The second love that most women make out of their first love for husbands grows from a mutual and tacit sadness in both husband and wife that he is only in rare moments the man both would like him to be.

Laura Riding

#43. Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.

Laura Riding

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. We shall know that we have begun to speak true by an increased hunger for true-speaking; we shall have the whole hunger only after we have given ourselves the first taste of it.

Laura Riding

#47. between the word and the world lie
fading eternities of soon

Laura Riding