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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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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
Less
Rightness
Truth
Provision
Ever
Attainment
Work
Practicals
Practical
Stopped
Ultimate
Poetry
Comprehended

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.
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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Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.
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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'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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In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else.
Laura Riding
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Truth rings no bells.
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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People get wisdom from thinking, not from learning.
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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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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My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
Laura Riding
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... whatever is not happening now is unimportant it is merely curious.
Laura Riding