Top 120 Olivia Laing Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “Loneliness is by no means a wholly worthless experience, but rather one that cuts right to the heart of what we value and what we need.”

— Olivia Laing

4. “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

5. “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 embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing.”

— Olivia Laing

6. “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

7. “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

8. “Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – 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. I.”

— Olivia Laing

9. “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

10. “There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.”

— Olivia Laing

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.”

— Olivia Laing

15. “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

16. “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

17. “I always consider myself either anonymous or odd looking,’ he once wrote, ’and there is an unspoken bond between people in the world that don’t fit in or are not attractive in the general societal sense.”

— Olivia Laing

18. “Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.”

— Olivia Laing

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

— Olivia Laing

20. “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

21. “Loss is a cousin of loneliness. They intersect and overlap, and so it’s not surprising that a work of mourning might invoke a feeling of aloneness, of separation. Mortality is lonely. Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that’s moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture. Then there’s the loneliness of bereavement, the loneliness of lost or damaged love, of missing one or many specific people, the loneliness of mourning.”

— Olivia Laing

22. “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.”

— Olivia Laing

23. “I was walled up inside myself, and certainly a very long way from anyone else.”

— Olivia Laing

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Loneliness is a very special place. It isn’t always easy to see the truth of Wilson’s statement, but over the course of my travels I’ve come to believe that he was right, that loneliness is by no means a wholly worthless experience, but rather one that cuts right to the heart of what we value and what we need. Many marvellous things have emerged from the lonely city: things forged in loneliness, but also things that function to redeem it.”

— Olivia Laing

27. “They were that kind of family, estranged, huge upholstered couches of absolute silence between them.”

— Olivia Laing

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Interesting, the idea that loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality.”

— Olivia Laing

34. “It wasn’t a feeling that had a source, except in the way the source of hay fever is flowers.”

— Olivia Laing

35. “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

36. “People weren’t sane anymore, which didn’t mean they were wrong. Some sort of cord between action and consequence had been severed. Things still happened, but not in any sensible order, it was hard to talk about truth because some bits were hidden, the result or maybe the cause, and anyway the space between them was full of misleading data, nonsense and lies.”

— Olivia Laing

37. “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. Then again, it can be transient, lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the loneliness that follows on the heels of a bereavement, break-up, or change in social circles.”

— Olivia Laing

38. “If you destroy the habitat of a species, if you kill off the food it depends on – milk parsley, in the case of the Swallowtail – then it is done for. William Burroughs had a nice phrase for it. It no longer has the ghost of a chance. Mind.”

— Olivia Laing

39. “We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark.”

— Olivia Laing

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Love is the world, pain is the world.”

— Olivia Laing

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

— Olivia Laing

46. “Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself.”

— Olivia Laing

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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