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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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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
Sleep
Future
Doorstep
Maker
Sits
Makers
Poetry
Late
Listening

More quotes by 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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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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Truth rings no bells.
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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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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My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
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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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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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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Women, ever since there have been women, have had a way of being people.
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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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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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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I met God. 'What,' he said, 'you already?' 'What,' I said, 'you still?
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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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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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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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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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