Laura Riding citations (42 citations)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Lives of Wives (London: Cassell, 1939)

“All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"All Literature", from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

“Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"How it came about?" from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

“A new type of poem has been evolved and popularized by the demands of the anthology-reading public. It is called 'the perfect modern lyric.' Like the best-seller novel, it is usually achieved in the dark; but certain critical regulations can be made for it. It must be fairly regular in form and easily memorized, it must be a new combination of absolutely warn-out material, it must have a certain unhealthy vigour or languor, and it must start off engagingly with a simple sentimental statement. Somewhere a daring pseudo-poetical image must be included…”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (London: Doubleday, 1928)

“Caesar was a reserved, disbelieving, obdurate man, and Cleopatra had conquered him by loving him for what others found repellent. ‘In you, Caesar,’ she told him, ‘I have something that, being not sweet, will not corrupt—but, like a sour metal, will only tarnish.’ And in Cleopatra Caesar had something of another world, something hellish it might be, a stranger—but, because a stranger, one with whom he could yield to weariness of himself and yet feel that in his own world he had lost none of its secrets.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Lives of Wives (London: Cassell, 1939)

“I would then say that there are two kinds of feeling. The first is to feel in the sense of concentrating your emotions on something immediately available for your understanding: you make your understanding out of the emotions you have about it. The second is to feel in the sense of being affected without trying to understand: something is felt, you do not know what, and it is more important to feel it than to try to understand it, since once you try to understand it you no longer feel it.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"The Idea of God" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

“She [Cleopatra] was then a very young girl, but had already begun to look upon the world as a mean, dark place, in which fortune and brightness were to be had only be seizing from others what one could and keeping it in one’s hold as long as possible. Believing that there were not enough desirable things for all to have share in them, she made up her mind that the happiest person was the one who was the cleverest thief. She worked with vicious fanaticism to have what she coveted; thinking that none knew so well as herself the joy of possessing and none therefore deserved so much. When she had won her way she softened as a goddess to mortals—pouring out affection and benevolence with an abandon that was unmatchable and frightening, but irresistible. Then she was happy, and felt virtuous.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Lives of Wives (London: Cassell, 1939)

“… poets are sensitive to the challenge 'What is the moral justification of poetry?' because they are conscious of the intrinsic goodness of poetry. Goody-goody humanitarian causes draw them easily into membership by making them wince at the notion of all the injustices prevalent in the world of physical consciousness. Let it be declared as clearly as possible that the goodness of poetry is not moral goodness, the goodness of temporal action, but the goodness of thought, the loving exercise of the will in the pursuit of truth.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from "Poetry and Politics", reprinted in The Common Asphodel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949)

“The object of all religious activity is to mingle the human and the non-human, and the lower gods represent that which is cast back to the human from the non-human – human gods merely, practice-gods who embody the errors which man makes in first conceiving the non-human.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"The Bull-Fight" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"The Idea of God" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

“Every woman must live by some sense of victory over disappointments, and Olympias was not the sort of woman to find compensation in her own powers of self-control and endurance.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Lives of Wives (London: Cassell, 1939)

“Euripides seems to have felt that the dignified perfection of Sophocles could be challenged only by novelty and irresponsibility. The religious conditions of the Dionysian festival kept him within certain bounds… But within the imposed limits Euripides was as profane as he dared to be, making melodrama of the divine realities which his predecessors accepted religiously, using the stage merely as a convenience for popularizing his own eccentric values.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from "Poetic Drama", reprinted in The Common Asphodel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949)

“God' is the name given to the most ‘important’ human idea. In English, as in other languages, the original sense of the word is obscure. But the character of the name is the same in all languages: it is a question. 'God' is the question 'Is there something more important than, something besides, man?”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"The Idea of God" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

“In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centred in this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader. The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was replaced by science; inspiration by psychology.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"What is a Poem?" from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"The Myth" from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

“The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"On Ambiguity" in Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).

“Political statements all have a battle flavour - attack, counter-attack, defence. Left political statements generally have a counter-attack flavour, though the Conservative flavour is not attack but defence. A large part of Left rhetoric is spent in imposing the 'attack' flavour on the Conservative position (for example, in such phrases as: 'inspired Capitalist opinion', 'predatory imperialist interests', 'the ruling financial oligarchy').”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Harry Kemp from The Left Heresy in Literature and Life (London: Methuen, 1939)

“Pseudo-modernists pursue individual style because they know they cannot make a name without it; but if they had lived in the eighteenth century their sole object would have been to write correctly, to conform to the manner of the period. In practice, their conforming individualism means an imitation, studiously concealed, of the eccentricities of poems which really are individual.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927)

“Metaphor… is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"The Matter of Metaphor" in Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).

“I think you're right about the difference between the Trojan mind and the Greek mind: the Greeks live in their imaginations while the Trojans always try to see things as they really are. And with some things they do get hold of the truth, and with some things they don't. But, where they don't, they won't have substitutes. That's why their world-outlook is so much smaller than ours. It's concentrated in a few certainties which are far ahead of anything we'll arrive at, but when you have these you feel that the rest is a blank and long to be back in the bigger world again, where there's space and variety and perplexity.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Helen in A Trojan Ending (London: Constable, 1937)

“Politics have always covered two distinct kinds of problems: problems of administrative routine, and those that may be called 'questions of the moment.'… A question of the moment is, indeed, a substitute for some notion, such as the idea of God, or hereditary monarchy, or national glory, that has hitherto acted as a symbol of human co-ordination. It provides no new positive certainty to replace the discredited certainty, but is what the name implies: the raising of a question which the old certainty no longer answers.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from "Poetry and Politics", reprinted in The Common Asphodel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949)

“Their common assumption [communists and left-wing poets] is that every one must stand somewhere politically - and especially the poets, who are under suspicion as unpractical people who shirk the responsibility of taking a stand.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Harry Kemp from The Left Heresy in Literature and Life (London: Methuen, 1939)

“Yet what representative trio do not make a mad trio? Blake, Mrs. Aphra Behn, Zeno - not a typical but a representative threesome… Things do not go in simple pairs. Poetry is not a case of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bridges and Masefield, Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. Poetry is some awkward trio - like Caedmon, Oliver Goldsmith, Edna St. Vincent Millay. So with the novel.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Description of Life (Targ Editions, 1980)

“When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation…. Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927)

“Anger is precious because it is an immediate, undeniable clue to what our minds (so much more cautious in rejection and resistance than our bodies) will not tolerate.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"In Defence of Anger" from Essays from Epilogue (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001)

“The child begins with crude sex alone. It innocently indulges itself in sensual pleasures. It loves kissing and to be kissed, stroking and to be stroked, fondly contemplating its excretions. The civilized society into which it is born magnifies the importance of these insignificant local sensations, gives them intellectual depth. It creates a handsome receptacle, love, to contain the humours of this unnaturally enlarged instinct.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"The Damned Thing", from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

“You know the story of the famous seer Phineus whom the Argonauts consulted when they stopped in Salmydessos in Thrace on their way to Colchis to get the golden fleece. He was blind, but not entirely blind - he could see just enough to see that he could not see. And the little flickering spots of light that forced themselves on him were wind-harpies trying to steal from him his prophetic power. So he would beg everyone to make him blind, to rid him of the harpies. But people laughed at him because, so far as they could tell, he was as blind as any man needed to be. Only Hercules understood, because his spirit extended into the divine shadows. Only Hercules had the courage to make the blind Phineus blind.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Cassandra in A Trojan Ending (London: Constable, 1937)

“If you take two words like 'tame' and 'domesticated', you're forced to think of the divergence in meaning, not the similarity. You say to yourself, in getting it clear, "A dog is a tame wolf, a cat is a domesticated tiger." A cat never really tames, while tameness is the essence of a dog's soul. You tame the wolf into a dog, but the tiger domesticates itself into a cat. In this way there's more real oppositeness between things that are like than between things that are different. The kind of oppositeness, I mean, that there is between words when you discard one in favour of another.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

Description of Life (Targ Editions, 1980)

“The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention – incites a pleasurable compulsion to ‘follow’ – is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.”

Help us translate this quote

Laura Riding Jackson

"The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23

Laura Riding citations

Laura Riding: Citations en anglais

Auteurs similaires

Richard Bach 8

Kurt Vonnegut 29

John Steinbeck 18

William Faulkner 18

Ray Bradbury 20

Jack London 12

Vladimir Nabokov 39

Francis Scott Fitzgerald 18

Anaïs Nin 16

Charles Bukowski 19