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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

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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
Men
Putting
Bodily
Noble
Contradictory
Thus
Symbol
Subject
Double
Subjects
Uses
Existence
Significance
Woman
Symbols
Use
Romance
Purifies

More quotes by Laura Riding

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In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else.
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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.
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... whatever is not happening now is unimportant it is merely curious.
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My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
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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.
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Women, ever since there have been women, have had a way of being people.
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.
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People get wisdom from thinking, not from learning.
Laura Riding
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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
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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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Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.
Laura Riding
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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
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Myth is a tale once believed as truth believed, it is not myth, but religion. A tale once religiously believed that has come to be called a myth is something of religion corrupted with disbelief. What are beliefs for some societies but myths for others cannot fill spiritual vacancies in the life of those others.
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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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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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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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
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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
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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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Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.
Laura Riding