Laura Riding Quotes

• 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

• 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

• There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

  Laura Riding

• 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

• Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

  Laura Riding

• 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.

  Laura Riding

• 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.

  Laura Riding

• I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.

  Laura Riding

• 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.’

  Laura Riding

• 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

• Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.

  Laura Riding

Laura Riding (11)

Birth:	16th January, 1901
Death:	2nd September, 1991
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Essayist, Novelist, Poet

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Today's Anniversary - 15th May

Births

• 1935 - Ted Dexter
• 1963 - Joseph Prince
• 1951 - Jonathan Richman
• 1936 - Wavy Gravy
• 1923 - Richard Avedon

Deaths

• 1925 - Nelson A. Miles
• 2008 - Willis Lamb
• 1978 - Robert Menzies
• 1976 - Samuel Eliot Morison
• 1986 - Theodore H. White