Laura Riding Quotes - Page 2

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Art Giving Reality Religion Truth Writing

Women are strangers in the country of man.

Laura Riding

Country, Men, Stranger

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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

Learning, Thinking, Bridges

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

Laura Riding

Spiritual, Religious, Use

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Emile Saint-Blague had been a lively, versatile painter in his youth, but he had abused his energy by painting too many pictures; so that in what might have been the ripe period of his art he had nothing left but ideas. A man who has nothing left but ideas may be of great service to his friends, but he is of no use at all to himself. Emile was certainly an inspiration to his friends.

Laura Riding

Art, Inspiration, Men

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... whatever is not happening now is unimportant; it is merely curious.

Laura Riding

Curious, Happenings, Unimportant

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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

Military, Writing, Son

"A Pamphlet Against Anthologies". Book by Laura Riding, 1928.

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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

Forever, Religion, Done

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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

Sleep, Poetry, Listening

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The terms 'male' and 'female' must be understood as representing no mere 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

Sex, Moving, Men

"A Personal Letter, With a Request for a Reply (1937)". "The World And Ourselves". Book by Laura Riding, www4.ntu.ac.uk. 1938.

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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

Strange Places, People, Kind

"Progress of Stories". Book by Laura Riding. Chapter "Daisy and Venison", 1935.

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Daisy was a consciously happy young woman without any of the usual endowments that make for conscious happiness, money apart. She was not pretty, she was not clever, she had no friends, no talents, nor even an imagination to make her think she was happy when she was really miserable. As she was never miserable, she had no need of an imagination.

Laura Riding

Clever, Thinking, Imagination

"Progress of Stories". Book by Laura Riding. Chapter "Daisy and Venison", 1935.

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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

Art, Problem, Poet

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Women from earliest times have been used as conveniences of communication with unseen, inaccessible powers, but always in the sense that such exposing of self to dangerous mysteries, such destruction of the understanding as was required to become the slave of unseen powers, did not matter because the communicant was only a woman, in herself an undetermined cipher - a nothing.

Laura Riding

Communication, Self, Understanding

"The Idea of God". "Essays from 'Epilogue' 1935-1937". Book by Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and Mark Jacobs, 2001.

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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

Real, Evil, Elements

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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

Religious, Men, Errors

"The Bull-Fight". "Essays from 'Epilogue' 1935-1937". Book by Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and Mark Jacobs, 2001.

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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

Mother, Sight, Expression

"The Matter of Metaphor". "Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays". Book by Laura Riding and Schuyler B. Jackson, edited by William Harmon, 1997.

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The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition.

Laura Riding

Mean, Play, Differences

"On Ambiguity". "Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays". Book by Laura Riding and Schuyler B. Jackson, edited by William Harmon, 1997.

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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

Circles, Criticism, Spiders

"Anarchism Is Not Enough". Book by Laura Riding. Chapter "The Corpus", 1928.

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Politics have always covered two distinct kinds of problems: problems of administrative routine, and those that may be called 'questions of the moment.' A question of the moment is, indeed, a substitute for some notion, such as the idea of God, or hereditary monarchy, or national glory, that has hitherto acted as a symbol of human co-ordination. It provides no new positive certainty to replace the discredited certainty, but is what the name implies: the raising of a question which the old certainty no longer answers.

Laura Riding

Names, Ideas, Two

"Poetry and Politics". "The Common Asphodel". Book by Robert Graves, 1949.

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

Laura Riding

Wall, Journey, Hiking

Laura (Riding) Jackson, Laura Riding (1938). “Collected Poems”

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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

Women, Succeed, Disputes

Laura (Riding) Jackson, Laura Riding (1938). “Collected Poems”

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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

Art, Thinking, Ideas

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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

Husband, Sadness, First Love

"Lives of Wives". Book by Laura Riding, 1939.

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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

Writing, Literature, May

"Anarchism Is Not Enough". Book by Laura Riding. Chapter: "All Literature", 1928.

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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

Rejection, Mind, Body

"In Defence of Anger". "Essays from 'Epilogue' 1935-1937". Book by Laura Riding, Robert Graves, and Mark Jacobs, 2001.

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Born: January 16, 1901
Died: September 2, 1991
Occupation: Poet
Cite this Page: Citation

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