Laura Riding

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

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

“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.'”

“There can be no literary equivalent to truth.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”