List of Laura Riding Quotes

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.

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.

Shakespeare Alternated Between Musical Surrenders To Social Prestige And Magnificent Fits Of Poetic Remorse.

Women From Earliest Times Have Been Used As Conveniences Of Communication With Unseen, Inaccessible Powers, But Always In The Sense That Such Exposing Of Self To Dangerous Mysteries, Such Destruction Of The Understanding As Was Required To Become The Slave Of Unseen Powers, Did Not Matter Because The Communicant Was Only A Woman, In Herself An Undetermined Cipher - A Nothing.

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.

All Literature Is Written By The Old To Teach The Young How To Express Themselves So That They In Turn May Write Literature To Teach The Old How To Express Themselves. All Literature Is Written By Mentally Precocious Adolescents And By Mentally Precocious Senescents.

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.

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.

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.

The New "ambiguity" Means, In A Way Adjudged Favorable To Literary, Poetic, Intellectually And Psychologically Well-devised And Praiseworthily Executed Linguistic Performance, Uncertainty Of Meaning, Or Difficulty For The Interpreter In Identifying Just What The Meaning In Question Is: It Means The Old Meanings Of Ambiguity With A Difference. It Means Uncertainty Of Meaning (of A Word Or Combination Of Words) Purposefully Incorporated In A Literary Composition For The Attainment Of The Utmost Possible Variety Of Meaning-play Compressible Within The Verbal Limits Of The Composition.

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.

The Object Of All Religious Activity Is To Mingle The Human And The Non-human, And The Lower Gods Represent That Which Is Cast Back To The Human From The Non-human - Human Gods Merely, Practice-gods Who Embody The Errors Which Man Makes In First Conceiving The Non-human.