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Quote by Laura Riding

“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.”

Quote by Laura Riding

Book:Lives of Wives

Work

This book delves into the personal stories and challenges faced by married women, offering a nuanced look at their lives. more

Author

Laura Riding, an influential American poet, was born on January 16, 1901, and passed away on September 2, 1991. Her poetry is known for its unique style and profound emotional expression, considered a significant voice in 20th-century American poetry. more

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“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.”

Humans Kind May Two Ideas Moments Problem Names Answers Glory Notion Symbols Certainty Substitutes Covered Routine Monarchy Administrative Hereditary Ordination

Author:Laura Riding

“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.”

Reality Seems Certain Values Felt Religious Conditions Stage Divine Limits Perfection Bounds Accepted Festivals Novelty Convenience Eccentric Predecessors Profane Melodrama Irresponsibility

Author:Laura Riding

“'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?'”

Men Humans Important Ideas Character Names Language Given Originals Obscure

Author:Laura Riding

“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.”

Knows Feels Trying Firsts Kind Two Important Feelings Felt Understanding Emotion Available Affected Standing Out Concentrating Understanding You

Author:Laura Riding

“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.”

Has Beens Self Matter Used Understanding Mystery Dangerous Communication Destruction Slave Unseen Convenience Exposing Inaccessible Ciphers

Author:Laura Riding

“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.”

Mind Body Resistance Rejection Tolerate Clue Cautious

Author:Laura Riding

“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.”

Men Firsts Humans Religious Practice Objects Activity Errors Casts Conceiving

Author:Laura Riding

“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.”

Firsts Mother Common Practice Expression Solutions Sight Metaphor Aids Wit Features Speakers Respectable Jam Halt Confronting Expediency Homely Mother Wit

Author:Laura Riding

“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.”

Way Wells Mean Play Differences Limits Performances Difficulty Variety Combination Uncertainty Poetic Composition Ambiguity Attainment Identifying Interpreter

Author:Laura Riding

“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.”

Giving May Long Causes Clear Effects Needed Make Sense Impossibility Eloquent Brevity Rendering Pausing Workmanship Compression

Author:Laura Riding