Laura Riding Quotes

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.

Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

Poetry is the gate through which I enter the land of enchantment. Once inside the flaming wall, my limitations fall from me, and my spirit is free.

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

The Poet is like the prince of the clouds, who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer. Exiled on the ground in the midst of the jeering crowd, his giant's wings keep him from walking.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.