Laura Riding Quotes

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Scientist alone is true poet.

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

I would be glad to worship success if I could find her.

O brave poets, keep back nothing; Nor mix falsehood with the whole! Look up Godward! speak the truth in Worthy song from earnest soul! Hold, in high poetic duty, Truest Truth the fairest Beauty.

Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.

I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.

I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Where there are many beauties in a poem I shall not cavil at a few faults proceeding either from negligence or from the imperfection of our nature.

I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth.

Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.

You have a point," said Fronto, "and even a poet must occasionally bow to logic.

I think it started to feel like home when I stopped maintaining any pretense that I was ever going to be in the movie business. I went there like many writers - I had a screenplay deal and I would go to these meetings and it was the typical thing. And I hated it. I was not interested in writing screenplays, actually. But I kept feeling like that was what I was supposed to do. It was just this horrible cognitive dissonance.