Laura Riding (1901–1991)

A few passages from Experts Are Puzzled:

Their hands, with which they wrote, were a-tingle, but their feet, with which the hesitated, were numb, and their faces, with which they regretted what they wrote, were blue. And so they went on, hoping to write something that they would not regret, but continually regretting and therefore growing continually more and more blue-in-the face.

What then of fiction? What then of truth? The only answer that may be given is that it is not possible to lie.

My show more friends love me. My lovers adore me. I must choose among them, though I do not wish to, since my beauty demands action.

I miss the rendez-vous by a shyness of the inexact, you by a shyness of the insufficient. We do not touch. But our language is the language of the rendez-vous.

And so I don’t want you to think that even fundamentally the subject of money bores me. Nothing that can be turned into writing bores me.

Obtuseness is a time-proved protection against the danger of facing facts more squarely than one’s interests require. show less

Laura Riding writes:

Plainly the only problem is to avoid the love of lost identity which drives so many clever people to hold difficult points of view – by difficult I mean big, hungry, religious points of view which absorb their personality. I for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my point of view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number of points of view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the fingers of my hand, to hold my cup, to show more tap the table for me and fold themselves away when I do not wish to think.

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