Laura Riding Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

People get wisdom from thinking, not from learning.

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.

Truth rings no bells.

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.

Women are strangers in the country of man.

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

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

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

Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.