Olivia Laing Quotes

Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive. ~ Olivia Laing

Physically, Echo Spring is nothing more than a nickname for a liquor cabinet, drawn from the brand of bourbon it contains. ~ Olivia Laing

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

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

I was starting to realise, which isn't to say I was transitioning from one thing to another, but rather that I inhabited a space in the centre, which didn't exist, except there I was. ~ Olivia Laing

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. ~ Olivia Laing

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

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. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I'm trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing. ~ Olivia Laing

I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted. ~ Olivia Laing

It began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply sleeping beside another body night after night gives no express right of entry to the interior world of their thoughts or dreams;that we are separate in the end whatever contrary illusions we may cherish; and that this miserable truth might as well be faced, since it will be dinned into one, like it or not by the failings of those we hold dear. I wasn't so bitter now. I'd begun to emerge into a sense of satisfaction with my not, but it would be a long time before I trusted someone, for I'd seen how essentially unknowable even the best loved might prove to be. ~ Olivia Laing

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 and I was embarassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing. I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhleming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. ~ Olivia Laing

Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. ~ Olivia Laing

You could go two ways from there. You could keep on marinating in blame, in helpless submission to your circumstance. Or you could stop, just clean stop, and take up the liberating burden of responsibility for yourself. ~ Olivia Laing

The art of writing was independently born in these four regions and I do not think it a coincidence that the advent of the written word was nourished by river water. ~ Olivia Laing

But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein's life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly. ~ Olivia Laing

There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn't part of the deal. ~ Olivia Laing

[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

What a waste, what a crime to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, hated living at the end of the world, but then she couldn't help but find it interesting, watching people herself included compulsively foul their nest. ~ Olivia Laing

I've read about how alienated we've become, tethered to our devices, leery of real contact; how we are heading for a crisis of intimacy, as our ability to socialise withers and atrophies. But this is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We haven't just become alienated because we've subcontracted so many elements of our social and emotional lives to machines. It's no doubt a self-perpetuating cycle, but part of the impetus for inventing as well as buying these things is that contact is difficult, frightening, sometimes intolerably dangerous. ~ Olivia Laing

No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can't you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? It wasn't hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatised by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proferred sentence. Dumbness in this context might be a way of evading hurt, dodging the pain of failed communication by refusing to participate in it at all. That's how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock. ~ Olivia Laing

Obama. Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beached somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn't quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its eyes. ~ Olivia Laing

The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can't reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure. ~ Olivia Laing

In many ways, the internet made me feel safe. I liked the contact I got from it: the small accumulation of positive regard, the favoriting on Twitter, the Facebook likes, the little devices designed and coded for maintaining attention and boosting client egos. ~ Olivia Laing

Ten years ago, maybe even five, it was possible to ignore atrocities, to believe that these things happened somewhere else, in a different order of reality from your own. Now, perhaps because of the internet, it was like the blind spot had got very small, and motional like a marble. You couldn't rely on it. You could go on holiday but you knew corpses washed up there, if not now then then, or later. ~ Olivia Laing

I was working, but I didn't have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going on through glass, a light bulb at a time. ~ Olivia Laing

So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large? ~ Olivia Laing

There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure. ~ Olivia Laing

All these people talk about [Vivian Maier's] hoarding, the pack-rat way she went through life. Watching, I couldn't help but feel their reactions were at least partly about money and social status; about who has the right to ownership and what happens when people exceed the number of possessions that their circumstance and standing would ordinarily allow. I don't know about you but if I was asked to put everything I own in a small room in someone else's house, I might well look like a hoarder. Although neither extreme poverty nor wealth makes one immune to craving an excess of possessions, it's worth asking of any behaviour presented as weird or freakish whether the boundary being transgressed is class, not sanity at all. ~ Olivia Laing

There are sights too beautiful to swallow. They stay on the rim of the eye; it cannot contain them. ~ Olivia Laing

He loved the energy of the place, though he barely ever visited without getting shoved around or having his pockets picked. The slam of the city, the assault of neon and electric light, the roiling mass of people, made up of mixed elements: sailors, tourists, cops, hookers, hustlers and dealers. He wandered through the crowds, fascinated; a skinny boy with big teeth and glasses, his ribs sticking out. At the same time he was drawn to quieter, more inward pursuits. He liked to draw, liked going to the movies on his own or wandering round the dioramas in the Natural History Museum; the dusty smell, the long unpopulated corridors. ~ Olivia Laing

What did I want? What was I looking for? What was I doing there, hour after hour? Contradictory things. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated. I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space. ~ Olivia Laing

Love is the world, pain is the world. ~ Olivia Laing

Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth. ~ Olivia Laing

Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame that grows up like thorns around it. ~ Olivia Laing

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

99.9 per cent of the matter of all the human bodies on the planet, all 6 billion of them, takes up no more space than a single sugar cube. The rest is made up of empty space and drifts of electrons, nothing more. ~ Olivia Laing

Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place. A city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost. ~ Olivia Laing

A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads, ~ Olivia Laing

They were that kind of family, estranged, huge upholstered couches of absolute silence between them. ~ Olivia Laing

Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee. ~ Olivia Laing

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness, of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails. ~ Olivia Laing

It seems funny to think that healing or coming to terms with loneliness and loss, or with the damage accrued in scenes of closeness, the inevitable wounds that occur whenever people become entangled with one another, might take place by means of objects. It seems funny, and yet the more I thought about it the more prevalent it was. People make things – make art or things that are akin to art – as a way of expressing their need for contact, or their fear of it; people make objects as a way of coming to terms with shame, with grief. People make objects to strip themselves down, to survey their scars, and people make objects to resist oppression, to create a space in which they can move freely. Art doesn't have to have a reparative function, any more than it has a duty to be beautiful or moral. All the same, there is art that gestures towards repair; that, like Wojnarowicz's stitched loaf of bread, traverses the fragile space between separation and connection. ~ Olivia Laing

Not so long ago, I spent a period in New York City, that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass, inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Though it wasn't by any means a comfortable experience, I began to wonder if Woolf wasn't right, if there wasn't more to the experience than meets the eye -- if, in fact, it didn't drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive. ~ Olivia Laing

Had trouble again with twine. Mad enough to wish I was a bad tornado. Swore at God.' 18 ~ Olivia Laing

I was walled up inside myself, and certainly a very long way from anyone else. ~ Olivia Laing

Of these latter, desolating states, she comments: 'Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person's empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person's loneliness. ~ Olivia Laing

Interesting, the idea that loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality. ~ Olivia Laing

David was a loner. Although he knew many people, he preferred to relate to them one-to-one. Everyone knew a slightly different David. ~ Olivia Laing

Safer cities, cleaner cities, richer cities, cities that grow ever more alike: what lurks behind the rhetoric of the Quality of Life Task Force is a profound fear of difference, a fear of dirt and contamination, an unwillingness to let other life-forms coexist. And what this means is that cities shift from places of contact, places where diverse people interact, to places that resemble isolation wards, the like penned with the like. This ~ Olivia Laing

The relief of virtual space, of being plugged in, of having control. Everywhere I went in New York, on the subway, in cafés, walking down the street, people were locked into their own network. The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone. ~ Olivia Laing

But already this isn't quite right. The first apartment I had wasn't on the island at all. It was in Brooklyn Heights, a few blocks away from where I would have been living in the alternate reality of accomplished love, the ghostly other life that haunted me for almost two full years. ~ Olivia Laing

What did people know, what were they ignorant of? This was the problem with history, it was too easy to provide the furnishings but forget the attitudes, the way you became a different person according to what knowledge was available, what experiences were fresh and what had not yet arisen in a personal or global frame. ~ Olivia Laing

Taking a photograph is an act of possession, a way of making something visible while simultaneously freezing it in place, locking it in time. ~ Olivia Laing

The Irish question is this: Do the Irish know the answer to everything? ... And the answer to that is that we know fifteen different answers to every question. All of them right. ~ Olivia Robertson

I feel alive, fit and active. I have no plans for retirement. My only concession to getting a little older is that I like to have a cat-nap in the afternoon. After that, I can push on through anything. ~ Olivia Newton-John

Within seconds, my eyes find Olivia. It's like they're drawn to her. ~ Michelle Leighton

The difference between film and theater is that in film, an actor is sort of under a magnifying glass and everything that they do, just the smallest movement, is very detectible. ~ Olivia Thirlby

I'm a real girly-girl. ~ Olivia Culpo

Fashion has always been in my life, thanks to my mother and my aunt growing up. I think as I became an adult, my style evolved, and my love of fashion evolved even more. ~ Olivia Palermo

Come now, Olivia, where's your sense of humor?" Jack asked.
"It made a hasty departure when you entered my life. ~ Lorraine Heath

I have many debates now with friends on the changes, and the continuing confusion over bringing up your children, instilling values, letting them make the right choices. ~ Olivia Williams

My father was king of the guidebooks and our holidays were always planned, taking us from a great gallery to an ace cafe to a beautiful view. And as an actor, I loathe improvisation because there's no structure and no one knows what's going on. ~ Olivia Williams

Genetically, I'm like my mum, and she looked great right up until her death in 1989. ~ Olivia Newton-John

I feel you, Kellen," she whispered. "Inside my body. Inside my soul. I feel you. ~ Olivia Cunning

I do think that that would be fair, but I can understand that people would be a little apprehensive to take that road because there is a tradition of natural-born women, but today where there are so many surgeries and so many people out there who have a need to change for a happier life, I do accept that because I believe it's a free country. ~ Olivia Culpo

He glanced at Trey nervously and quickly averted his gaze to settle on Brian. "You guys rock. I absolutely idolize you. I wan't to be you."
"I want to do you," Trey said, toying with the hair at the nape of Mark's neck. ~ Olivia Cunning

I've often wondered, even to this day, why during painful times some people seem to step away from themselves and make decisions that fall far out of their usual line of character and behaviour. Perhaps a natural reluctance to sit still is central, or perhaps, like the lesser animals, instinct forces us to go on even if grief has left us not up to the task…. In one fleeting moment, I stripped away the petals of my future, let them catch wind, and fly away ~ Ann Howard Creel

I guess we'll just sit around here and casually die, then. ~ Olivia Harvard

All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her husband and said: Has it happened at last, Gerald? Have I become a curiosity? ~ Helen Oyeyemi

When the plague struck Chicago, the townspeople here erected the gargoyles, and nary a soul was lost to the Black Death."
"The bubonic plague predates Chicago by about five hundred years."
He lowered himself to the bench. "I know. I was very disappointed when I found out. Almost as bad as when I learned there were no fairies. The world is much more interesting with goblins and plagues."
"Unless you catch the plague. ~ Kelley Armstrong

I want to kiss every inch of you," he murmured and ground his cock against her mound. "Then I want to lick every inch. And touch. Then suck. Then fuck." He gave her hair a hard tug. "Every inch. ~ Olivia Cunning

I was involved in a bunch of school activities - I was a cheerleader, I was on the chess team, I was vice president of my class. ~ Olivia Holt

But not tonight. Tonight is all about Olivia - beautiful, sexy, courageous, passionate Olivia. Tonight, I want her to see what I see.
"Look at yourself," I say. I pull her long hair over one shoulder and place a kiss in the bend of her neck. She tilts her head to give me better access. "You're the most beautiful girl in the room."
"So sexy."
"Any man would die to have this for even one night. ~ M. Leighton

I am nine.
We are bored
and Karen is dying.

We drove to Austin
that summer
so Sarah's dad-

who described Karen as
/the great and impossible love/
of his life, who taught us

the word /lymphoma/ and then,
the concept of the prefix,
how it explains where the tumor lives-

could say goodbye.

The house is a rind
spooned out by the onset of death,
what's left in the medicine cabinet

full of razors & we are hungry
& alone & sitting
on the living room floor

where the light
from a naked window
slices the hardwood

like a melon, brandishes
each, individualfuzz
on my scabbed calf

a field of erect, yellow poppies
& we have been alive as girls
long enough to know

to scowl at this reveal
& what better time
than now to practice removal.

Once, I watched my mother
skin a potato in six
perfect strokes

I remember this
as Sarah teaches me
to prop up my leg
on the side of the tub

and runs the blade
along my thing, /See?/
she says, /Isn't that so much better?/

Before we left Albuquerque
her father warned us,
/She will have no hair/

a trait
we have just
begun to admire

except, of course
for the hair he is talking about
we hold against our n ~ Olivia Gatwood

The difference
between being bound
and being connected
is perception. ~ Olivia Barnes

Olivia married sexy Ghandi. No wonder she loves her husband. ~ Tarryn Fisher

an age of chivalry as outmoded as honour, as obsolete as truth. ~ Olivia Manning

This is why we work together," he said. "We're different, but harmonious". ~ Olivia Cunning

Trey, are you molesting virgins again?

~Brian ~ Olivia Cunning

You make me feel like I've lost control… of my thoughts… my emotions."
"Is that so bad?" Ethan presses her palm to his chest so she can feel the rhythmic beating of his heart. "You're not the only one who feels that way. The moment I saw you… my heart beat your name." Ethan O'Connell & Olivia James - Intractable Souls ~ Tricia Daniels

There is
a heaviness in me
worth my weight in gold,
passed over for copper. ~ Olivia Barnes

It burned, but it was beautiful. ~ Olivia Fuller

I watch her, amazed how my body does what she tells it to without hesitation and it's in this moment I realize, Olivia isn't mine ... I'm hers. ~ Skyla Madi

I'm still a student of fashion, but I like hooking up with the people that really know how to make cool clothes. ~ Olivia Wilde

Nothing I have done professionally will top the feeling I got when singing with John Farnham at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. ~ Olivia Newton-John

[Olivia:] "It's just that I was already at my calorie limit for the day before I had the liquor, and I want to go to Europe in my skinny jeans."

[Tobias:] "What the hell are skinny jeans?"

"They're the jeans that you buy that are too small so that someday you can wear them and feel awesome."

He put his fork down and stared at me, openmouthed. "There are so many things wrong with that sentence. I don't even know where to start."

"It's okay. This is advanced self-loathing. You'd have to be a woman to understand it at this level. ~ Lucy March

Maybe their whole army was just made up of players. Except Ator'aq, Olivia noticed. He had made the rounds in the bar, but he left alone, to the visible disappointment of pretty much every female in the bar and the relief of every male. ~ Calista Skye

I'd said to myself once that Gabriel preferred a life where he felt as little responsibility for others as possible. That was true. But even more true is the fact that he preferred a life where others felt no responsibility for him. ~ Kelley Armstrong

I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Ah Myrna, I think I've loved you since I took my first breath." ...
"Don't be afraid, Myr. I love you more than I could ever put into words, but I won't fail you. I promise. This love, our love, is forever. ~ Olivia Cunning

If the blind must lead the blind, it is as well
that the leader knows he is. ~ R.D. Laing

I'm sorry Mr Lichtenstein, but your January birthday means only one thing and that's you're probably conceived
on April Fools Day. ~ Olivia Lichtenstein

You do know you're a woman, right?" I ask.
"Are you sure?" Olivia asks with an astonished face. "I thought I had a penis. ~ Katelin LaMontagne

As for the industry, it has certainly changed. I think with all of these television shows and YouTube and the internet, you have so much less time to develop as an artist and perfect your craft. So many things today are "instant" and, that's not always a good thing. ~ Olivia Newton-John

A lot of the time, if I have samples, I can't tailor a sample. Or, I might have just bought something and I don't have time to go to the tailor, there are ways to take thin, skinny belts and layer them, and do quick little fixes. ~ Olivia Palermo

Honestly, there isn't anywhere in the world that I can say I would never travel to, given the opportunity. ~ Christie Laing

The whole process of winning the pageant has been so amazing, I'm really excited to move forward into all kinds of projects. ~ Olivia Culpo

Difficult trainers were the ones most willing to take a chance with a green jockey, and Bill Chandler was a prince compared to Otto Laing. ~ Bev Pettersen

I get my inspiration from young stylish girls I see all over my travels. ~ Olivia Palermo

Without you, I'm nothing. Don't you understand that? ~ Olivia Cunning