Laura Riding famous quotes

I met God. 'What,' he said, 'you already?' 'What,' I said, 'you still?
-- Laura Riding

#God #Mets #Said

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

#Memories #Giving #Mind

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

#Degrees #Consciousness

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

#Men #Romance #Noble

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

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

#Musical #Poetic #Fit

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

#Thinking #Long #Pieces

Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.
-- Laura Riding

#Writing #Mean #Practice

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

#Views #Vices #Attention

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

#Religious #Reality #Perfection

God' is the name given to the most 'important' human idea. In English, as in other languages, the original sense of the word is obscure. But the character of the name is the same in all languages: it is a question. 'God' is the question 'Is there something more important than, something besides, man?
-- Laura Riding

#Character #Men #Names

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

#Two #Understanding #Feelings

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

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

Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.
-- Laura Riding

#Long #Giving #May

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

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 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

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

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

#Disappointment #Self #Victory

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

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

Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.
-- Laura Riding

#Appearance #Deceiving #Enough

I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.
-- Laura Riding

#Believe #Magic #Doe

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

#Wall #Sound #Boots

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

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
-- Laura Riding

#Book

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

#Sex #Couple #Hungry

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

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

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

#People #Strange #Kind

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

#Sex #Moving #Men

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

#Running #Art #People