In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else. Laura Riding More Quotes by Laura Riding More Quotes From Laura Riding She [Venison] had never travelled and so could invent all kinds of strange places without being limited, as travelled people are, by knowledge of certain places only. Laura Riding strange-places kind people rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity. Laura Riding use religious spiritual Learning can be a bridge between doing and thinking. But then there is a danger that the person who uses learning as a bridge between doing and thinking may get stuck in learning and never get on to thinking. Laura Riding learning bridges thinking Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep. Laura Riding poetry listening sleep Women from earliest times have been used as conveniences of communication with unseen, inaccessible powers, but always in the sense that such exposing of self to dangerous mysteries, such destruction of the understanding as was required to become the slave of unseen powers, did not matter because the communicant was only a woman, in herself an undetermined cipher - a nothing. Laura Riding communication understanding self We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are. We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves. Laura Riding strange waiting stories The sciences that purport to treat of human things -- the new scientific storyings of the social, the political, the racial or ethnic, and the psychic, nature of human beings -- treat not of human things but mere things, things that make up the physical, or circumstantial, content of human life but are not of the stuff of humanity, have not the human essence in them. Laura Riding psychics political essence A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time - the telling of what came first and before done forever. Laura Riding done forever religion To tell one comprehensive story of how it has happened that what is is, one which shall hold true, come what may, now-after - a story that whatever comes shall perfectly continue or confirm: such is the ideal motive of religions. Laura Riding stories may religion ... whatever is not happening now is unimportant; it is merely curious. Laura Riding unimportant happenings curious My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain. Laura Riding function telling-the-truth stories If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth. Laura Riding being-there truth writing Women are strangers in the country of man. Laura Riding stranger men country we shall know that we have begun to speak true by an increased hunger for true-speaking; we shall have the whole hunger only after we have given ourselves the first taste of it. Laura Riding taste truth firsts Women, ever since there have been women, have had a way of being people. Laura Riding women people way When ... I comprehended that poetry had no provision in it for ultimate practical attainment of the rightness of work that is truth, but led on ever only to a temporizing less- than-truth ... I stopped. Laura Riding attainment provision practicals Evil I had never found satisfactorily placeable as an integral element of the universal, or total, content of existence. Indeed, evil is evil just because there is no logical place for it, no room in reality for it. It is unreal, and yet real as something unreal. Laura Riding elements real evil Emile Saint-Blague had been a lively, versatile painter in his youth, but he had abused his energy by painting too many pictures; so that in what might have been the ripe period of his art he had nothing left but ideas. A man who has nothing left but ideas may be of great service to his friends, but he is of no use at all to himself. Emile was certainly an inspiration to his friends. Laura Riding inspiration men art What second love could she [Olympias] make out of her ruined first love? The second love that most women make out of their first love for husbands grows from a mutual and tacit sadness in both husband and wife that he is only in rare moments the man both would like him to be. Laura Riding first-love sadness husband Daisy was a consciously happy young woman without any of the usual endowments that make for conscious happiness, money apart. She was not pretty, she was not clever, she had no friends, no talents, nor even an imagination to make her think she was happy when she was really miserable. As she was never miserable, she had no need of an imagination. Laura Riding imagination clever thinking
