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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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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
Story
Speaking
Makes
Wait
Stories
Reach
Seems
Listen
Much
Strange
Shall
Hear
Waiting

More quotes by 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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People get wisdom from thinking, not from learning.
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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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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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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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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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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Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.
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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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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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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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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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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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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In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else.
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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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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... whatever is not happening now is unimportant it is merely curious.
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