Laura Riding > Quotes

“Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”
― Laura Riding, Four Unposted Letters to Catherine

“Public interference with poetry rests on the popular delusion that an immediate commerce exists between historical truth and poetic truth; that the historical universe is potentially the poetic universe. The historical universe is, however, only a temporary aggregate of ideas. These ideas may direct the structure of the literary universe, which produces the philosophical journalism of a period; the structure of the poetic universe is directed by a person in single-handed conflict with the time-community. Science, the present-day aggregate of tribal ideas, puts on the creative mind a social compulsion to accept these ideas; and criticism acts, as usual, as the nattered instrument of conversion. Official literature is born of a critical rather than of a literary sense; it is the social institution which the [professionalized] poet is hired to serve.”
― Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs

“What is beheld through glass seems glass.

The quality of what I am
Encases what I am not,
Smoothes the strange world.
I perceive it slowly,
In my time,
In my material,
As my pride,
As my possession:
The vision is love.

When life crashes like a cracked pane,
Still shall I love
Even the strange dead as the living once.
Death also sees, though distantly,
And I must trust then as now
A prism — of another kind,
Through which one may not put one's hands or touch.”
― Laura Riding

“between the word and the world lie
fading eternities of soon”
― Laura Riding