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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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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
Character
Wins
Problem
Opposition
Good
Argument
Always
Devil
Characters
Therefore
Winning
Evil
Arguable

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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... whatever is not happening now is unimportant it is merely curious.
Laura Riding
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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
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In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else.
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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Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.
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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I met God. 'What,' he said, 'you already?' 'What,' I said, 'you still?
Laura Riding
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My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
Laura Riding
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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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rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.
Laura Riding
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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
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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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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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Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.
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