Quotes from Laura Riding

I met God. 'What,' he said, 'you already?' 'What,' I said, 'you still?

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.

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

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.

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.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

we shall know that we have begun to speak true by an increased hunger for true-speaking; we shall have the whole hunger only after we have given ourselves the first taste of it.

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.

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.

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.'

We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.

O vocables of love,The end of an end is an echo,A last cry follows a last cry.Finality of finalityIs perfection's touch of folly.

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

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.

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.

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.

That lost literature which only death reads.

People will think you brilliant only if you tell them what they know. To avoid being thought brilliant, avoid knowing what they know. Write to discover to yourself what you know. Anarchism is Not Enough

Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift: it is so nearly what would please me I cannot but perfect it

Conversation succeeds conversation, Until there's nothing left to talk about Except truth, the perennial monologue, And no talker to dispute it but itself.

Women, ever since there have been women, have had a way of being people.

Women are strangers in the country of man.

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.

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