Love Quote by Laura Riding

Riding takes the most socially disreputable form of attention - loathing - and treats it as a kind of erotic correspondence. Not redemption, not victimhood, but recognition. The provocation is deliberate: she’s not merely saying enemies are close; she’s insisting that hatred can be more intimate than affection because it requires study. To loathe well, you have to watch, interpret, and return, again and again, to the object you claim to reject.

The phrasing "loathing interest" is the hinge. Interest is already a confession of investment. Riding flips the usual moral hierarchy (love good, hate bad) and exposes how both run on the same fuel: fixation. When she says "I know what they mean", she’s claiming an unnerving reciprocity. The loather thinks they’re acting from righteous distance; she answers with psychological proximity, as if she can read the script behind their disgust. That’s power, but it’s also a kind of complicity: she’s acknowledging a shared system of attention, a closed circuit.

Her demand for "a name (as poetic as love)" is a poet’s complaint about vocabulary: culture gives romance an ornate lexicon, but offers only blunt nouns for antagonistic bonds. The incest comparison pushes it into taboo territory, not for shock alone but to stress the claustrophobia. Incest is intimacy without escape, a relationship structured by involuntary closeness. Riding suggests hatred can mimic that: passionate, binding, familial in its inability to let go.

Context matters: Riding, a modernist who distrusted sentimental language and later renounced poetry itself, is anatomizing the dark economy of regard. She’s writing from inside a world where art-making and public attention often arrive braided with contempt, and she refuses the comfort of pretending contempt is not, at root, a form of devotion.