Olivia Laing Quotes

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

Olivia Laing

#2. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else

Olivia Laing

#3. Outside the window, people threw dinner parties.

Olivia Laing

#4. 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

#5. When he changed his mind, very suddenly, expressing increasingly grave reservations into a series of hotel phones, I found myself adrift, stunned by the swift arrival and even swifter departure of everything I thought I lacked.

Olivia Laing

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#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

#10. As long as Frank was well, I was happy,' he wrote in Memoirs. 'He had a gift for creating a life and, when he ceased to be alive, I couldn't create a life for myself.' And in a letter, written to Windham early in 1964: 'next to my work, Frankie was my life.

Olivia Laing

#11. If I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant's wail: I don't want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I'm lonely. I'm scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held.

Olivia Laing

#12. 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

#13. There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn't part of the deal.

Olivia Laing

#14. 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

#15. [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

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

Olivia Laing

#17. 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

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

Olivia Laing

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

Olivia Laing

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. When it hurts,' wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, 'we return to the banks of certain rivers,

Olivia Laing

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one's being as laughing easily or having red hair.

Olivia Laing

#27. 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

#28. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired.

Olivia Laing

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Olivia Laing

#32. They'd even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young

Olivia Laing