77 Quotes by Laura Riding

What is beheld through glass seems glass.The quality of what I amEncases 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 loveEven the strange dead as the living once.Death also sees, though distantly,And I must trust then as nowA prism — of another kind,Through which one may not put one's hands or touch.

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.

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.

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.

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

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

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.