Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Conversation
Monologue
Succeed
Perennial
Talk
Monologues
Left
Talkers
Truth
Dispute
Women
Succeeds
Nothing
Disputes
Except
Talker

More quotes by Laura Riding

Image
Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.
Laura Riding
Image
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
Image
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
Image
... whatever is not happening now is unimportant it is merely curious.
Laura Riding
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.
Laura Riding
Image
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
Image
Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.
Laura Riding
Image
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
Image
I met God. 'What,' he said, 'you already?' 'What,' I said, 'you still?
Laura Riding
Image
Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.
Laura Riding
Image
In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else.
Laura Riding
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.
Laura Riding
Image
My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
Laura Riding