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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
Listening
Sleep
Future
Doorstep
Maker
Sits
Makers
Poetry
Late

More quotes by Laura Riding

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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.
Laura Riding
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Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.
Laura Riding
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... whatever is not happening now is unimportant it is merely curious.
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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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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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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Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.
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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'God' is the name given to the most 'important' human idea. In English, as in other languages, the original sense of the word is obscure. But the character of the name is the same in all languages: it is a question. 'God' is the question 'Is there something more important than, something besides, man?'
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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I met God. 'What,' he said, 'you already?' 'What,' I said, 'you still?
Laura Riding