Laura Riding's quotes

Laura Riding was the poetic rebel so fierce she tried to kill the entire art of poetry—because she believed it told lies. In an era of male literary giants, this intellectual force of nature demanded that language be an instrument of absolute truth, a quest that led to a famed and fiery partnership with Robert Graves. Then, at the height of her influence, she did the unthinkable: she renounced poetry altogether, declaring it a failure in the search for perfect truth. Her dramatic story is a gripping saga of a mind that refused to accept any limit, and her later philosophical writings challenge us to ask if our own words are built on a foundation of lies or an unshakable search for what is real.

Quotes (12)

Friendship

Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various...

Laura Riding 0

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 0

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 0

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

Laura Riding 0

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Laura Riding 0

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 0

Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various...

Laura Riding 0

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...

Laura Riding 0

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