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Olivia Laing QUOTES

Olivia Laing QUOTES

1 " [of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

2 " Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

3 " I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

4 " That’s the dream of sex, isn’t it? That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself, at long last desired, its strange tongue understood. "

― Olivia Laing

5 " Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

6 " The loneliness of difference, the loneliness of undesirability, the loneliness of not being admitted into the magic circles of connection and acceptance – the social and professional groupings, the embracing arms. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

7 " At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life. "

― Olivia Laing , The Trip to Echo Spring

8 " I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

9 " This is what's so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

10 " Collapse, spread, merging, union: these things sound like the opposite of loneliness, and yet intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

11 " There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

12 " Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

13 " Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

14 " What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

15 " I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal... I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

16 " Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

17 " That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper’s images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as “our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness”...
Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs. "

― Olivia Laing

18 " People don't like to talk about alcohol. They don't like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don't like to examine the damage it does and I don't blame them. I don't like it either. I know that desire for denial with every bone in my body: clavicle, sternum, femur and phalanx. "

― Olivia Laing , The Trip to Echo Spring

19 " The bodies state of red alert brings about a series of psychological changes, driven by gathering tides of adrenaline or cortisol. These are the fight or flight hormones, which act to help and organism respond to external stresses. But when a stress is chronic not acute, when it persists for years and is caused by something that cannot be outrun, then these biochemical alterations wreak havoc on the body. Lonely people are restless sleepers and experience a reduction in the restorative function of sleep. Loneliness drives up blood pressure, accelerates ageing, weakens the immune system and acts as a precursor to cognitive decline. According to a 2010 study, "Loneliness predicts increased morbidity and mortality". Which is an elegant way of saying that loneliness can prove fatal. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

20 " Manhattan across the water, the glittering towers. I was working, but I didn't have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I came back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going through on glass a lightbulb at a time. "

― Olivia Laing , The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone