Quote

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

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Laura Riding
Age: 90 †
Born: 1901
Born: January 16
Died: 1991
Died: September 2
Critic
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Madeleine Vara
Laura Reichenthal
Laura Riding Gottschalk
Barbara Rich
Laura Riding Jackson
Draw
Draws
Criticism
Live
Circumference
Like
Spiders
Hollow
Circle
Circles

More quotes by Laura Riding

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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
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Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.
Laura Riding
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People get wisdom from thinking, not from learning.
Laura Riding
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I met God. 'What,' he said, 'you already?' 'What,' I said, 'you still?
Laura Riding
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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
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Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.
Laura Riding
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Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.
Laura Riding
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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
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Women, ever since there have been women, have had a way of being people.
Laura Riding
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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
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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
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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
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Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.
Laura Riding
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Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.
Laura Riding
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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.
Laura Riding
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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
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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
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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
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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
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In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else.
Laura Riding