“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.”
Quotes by Laura Riding
“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.”
“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 RidingLaura Riding was an influential American poet, critic, novelist, and essayist whose work spanned much of the 20th century. Born Laura Reichenthal, she adopted the pen name Laura Riding and became know...