Laura Riding Quotes
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There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
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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.
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Her one serious failing was that she could not write above love. She could not write a story with more than one important character in it, whom she thought of for the moment as herself; with love there had to be at least two important characters.
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The anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living poets. They will either write toward the anthology or away from it. Anti-anthology poets often overreach themselves, inflicting protective distortions on their work - as parents in old Central Europe often deliberately maimed their sons to save them from compulsory military service.
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I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.
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I am not 'in pursuit of truth.' It is not my 'quarry.' I am of my human nature a thinker, and conscious of need, responsibility of thinking-speaking with truth. I do not go about hunting 'truths.'
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If you find something to tell, tell it to your truest, though that make little to tell; the truer you speak, the more you will know to tell.
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Every woman must live by some sense of victory over disappointments, and Olympias was not the sort of woman to find compensation in her own powers of self-control and endurance.
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Their common assumption communists and left-wing poets is that every one must stand somewhere politically - and especially the poets, who are under suspicion as unpractical people who shirk the responsibility of taking a stand.
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The terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ must be understood as representing no more primitive opposition of sex to sex; but as defining two worlds of differing quality, in either of which men and women may jointly move and live.
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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.
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Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.
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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.
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Polygamy and polyandry distribute the frightening physical solidarity of monogamy. Monogamous couples are always hungry for company: to dilute sex.
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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.
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Daisy was a consciously happy young woman without any of the usual endowments that make for conscious happiness, money apart. She was not pretty, she was not clever, she had no friends, no talents, nor even an imagination to make her think she was happy when she was really miserable. As she was never miserable, she had no need of an imagination.
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What is science? yard-measure and scale to philosophy, expert-accountant, bank clerk. What is poetry? miserable, ill-fed, underpaid, unionized labourer, pleased to oblige, grateful for work, flattering himself that poverty makes him an aristocrat.
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Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.
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The group is only interested in the formal publishing of individuals for the purpose of establishing their social solidarity.
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Metaphor... is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.