Top 120 Olivia Laing Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “That’s the dream of replication: infinite attention, infinite regard. The machinery of the internet has made it a democratic possibility, as television never could, since the audience in their living rooms necessarily far outnumbered the people who could be squeezed into the box. Not so with the internet, where anyone with access to a computer can participate, can become a minor deity.”

— Olivia Laing

52. “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

53. “In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.”

— Olivia Laing

54. “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

55. “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

56. “Loneliness is hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot be achieved by sheer willpower, or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connections. This is far easier said that done, especially for people whose loneliness arises from a state of loss or exile or prejudice, who have reason to fear or mistrust as well as long for the society of others.”

— Olivia Laing

57. “Outside the window, people threw dinner parties.”

— Olivia Laing

58. “In fact, isolation was one of the things she blamed on men: the way they separated women from each other, hauling them off to the suburbs to form self-absorbed family groups.”

— Olivia Laing

59. “In her diary of 1929, Virginia Woolf described a sense of inner loneliness that she thought might be illuminating to analyse, adding: ‘If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.’ Interesting, the idea that loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality.”

— Olivia Laing

60. “As for the SCUM of the manifesto, Solanas’s definition describes just the sort of women Warhol liked, at least from the other side of a camera: ‘dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females, who consider themselves fit to rule the universe, who have free-wheeled to the limits of this “society” and are ready to wheel on to.”

— Olivia Laing

61. “It was becoming increasingly easy to see how people ended up vanishing in cities, disappearing in plain sight, retreating into their apartments because of sickness or bereavement, mental illness or the persistent, unbearable burden of sadness and shyness, of not knowing how to impress themselves into the world.”

— Olivia Laing

62. “You can’t paint reality: you can only paint your own place in it, the view from your eyes, as manifested by your own hands.”

— Olivia Laing

63. “The closing of the center city is loneliness for everyone. The abandonment of the body is isolation, the triumph of pure fantasy.”

— Olivia Laing

64. “Not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.”

— Olivia Laing

65. “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?”

— Olivia Laing

66. “It’s funny, subletting, making a life among someone else’s things, in a home that someone else has created and long since left.”

— Olivia Laing

67. “Sometimes you want to be made meat; I mean to surrender to the body, its hungers, its need for contact, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily want to be served bloody or braised. And at other times, like Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud, you want to cruise, to pass unnoticed, to take your pick of the city’s sights.”

— Olivia Laing

68. “This is the thing about screens: you can never be sure how clear they are.”

— Olivia Laing

69. “A useful analogy for what she calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison.”

— Olivia Laing

70. “As Epictetus wrote almost two thousand years ago: ‘For because a man is alone, he is not for that reason also solitary; just as though a man is among numbers, he is not therefore not solitary.”

— Olivia Laing

71. “What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.”

— Olivia Laing

72. “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

73. “Freedom doesn’t mean being unburdened by the past. It means continuing into the future, dreaming all the time.”

— Olivia Laing

74. “I don’t suppose it was unrelated, either, to the fact that I was keeling towards the midpoint of my thirties, an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure.”

— Olivia Laing

75. “In some of these images you can tell that she’s spotted him, whipping a tissue to her mouth to spoil the value of his picture. Candids, they called them, a word that once meant pure, fair, sincere, free from malice.”

— Olivia Laing

76. “Screens facilitate projection and encourage individual expression while at the same time dehumanising the countless others concealed or embedded behind their own more or less lifelike avatars.”

— Olivia Laing

77. “Why does the past do this? Why does it linger instead of receding? Why does it return with such a force sometimes that the real place in which one stands or sits or lies, the place in which one’s corporeal body most undeniably exists, dissolves as if it were nothing more than a mirage? The past cannot be grasped; it is not possible to return in time, to regather what was lost or carelessly shrugged off, so why these sudden ambushes, these flourishes of memory?”

— Olivia Laing

78. “You can destroy a person without resorting to the graphic violence of the Realms; can crush hopes and squander dreams, waste talent, refuse to train and educate an able mind, but rather keep a person in a prison of work, without praise or prospects, and certainly unable to develop what is in them of mind and heart.”

— Olivia Laing

79. “I wonder now: is it fear of contact that is the real malaise of our age, underpinning the changes in both our physical and virtual lives. St Patrick’s Day.”

— Olivia Laing

80. “This is the kind of subtle geometric disturbance that Hopper was so skilled at, and which he used to kindle emotion in the viewer, to produce feelings of entrapment and wariness, of profound unease.”

— Olivia Laing

81. “What drives all these essays is a long-standing interest in how a person can be free, and especially in how to find a freedom that is shareable, and not dependent upon the oppression or exclusion of other people.”

— Olivia Laing

82. “What was happening was a consequence of stigmatisation, the brutal process by which society works to dehumanise and exclude people who are perceived not to fit, who exhibit unwanted behaviours, attributes and traits.”

— Olivia Laing

83. “Almost all city-dwellers are daily participants in a complex part-song of voices, sometimes performing the aria but more often the chorus, the call and response, the passing back and forth of verbal small change with near and total strangers.”

— Olivia Laing

84. “I’ve never stopped feeling ashamed about my unkindness, and nor have I ever forgotten how it felt to have the force field of his loneliness pressed up against me: an overwhelming, unmeetable need for attention and affection, to be heard and touched and seen.”

— Olivia Laing

85. “Loneliness as a desire for closeness, for joining up, joining in, joining together, for gathering what has otherwise been sundered, abandoned, broken or left in isolation. Loneliness as a longing for integration, for a sense of feeling whole.”

— Olivia Laing

86. “If you were the star of the biggest show on television and took a walk down an average American street one night while you were on the air, and if you looked through windows and saw yourself on television in everybody’s living room, taking up some of their space, can you imagine how you would feel? No matter how small he is, he has all the space anyone could ever want, right there in the television box.”

— Olivia Laing

87. “Under the gentle scrutiny of my friend, they diminished to a normal size: just the grit of everyday traffic with other humans. I walked home feeling buoyant, nearly invincible. I need my friends.”

— Olivia Laing

88. “Once you lose language, your isolation is absolute.”

— Olivia Laing

89. “It was like being a spy, carrying out perpetual surveillance. It was like becoming a teenager again, plunging into pools of obsession, moving on, riding the rocking swells, the changing surf.”

— Olivia Laing

90. “We crossed this river then and pulled away, and in the empty fields the lark still spilled praise.”

— Olivia Laing

91. “The lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it is by no means easy to dislodge.”

— Olivia Laing

92. “It was the rawness and vulnerability of his expression that proved so healing to my own feelings of isolation: the willingness to admit to failure or grief, to let himself be touched, to acknowledge desire, anger, pain, to be emotionally alive. His self-exposure was in itself a cure for loneliness, dissolving the sense of difference that comes when one believes one’s feelings or desires to be uniquely shameful.”

— Olivia Laing

93. “A paranoid reader is concerned with gathering information, tracing links and making the hidden visible. They anticipate and are perennially defended against disaster, catastrophe, disappointment. They are always on the lookout for danger, about which they can never, ever know enough.”

— Olivia Laing

94. “A child raised catholic knows the world is not all it seems; knows that other realms exist above the clouds or thousands of miles beneath the floor. Though these beliefs may in their detail be discarded, the sense remains: that the earth is porous; that the eyes are not to be trusted.”

— Olivia Laing

95. “If there is a current animating Warhol’s work, it is not sexual desire, not eros as we generally understand it, but rather desire for attention: the driving force of the modern age.”

— Olivia Laing

96. “It’s true that he painted, not once but many times, the loneliness of a large city, where the possibilities of connection are repeatedly defeated by the dehumanising apparatus of urban life. But didn’t he also paint loneliness as a large city, revealing it as a shared, democratic place, inhabited, whether willingly or not, by many souls?”

— Olivia Laing

97. “Nothing is more declarative of someone’s priorities than how they spend their money, particularly when they don’t have much of it.”

— Olivia Laing

98. “We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.”

— Olivia Laing

99. “Eugenics regards the human race as a kind of library, some volumes of which need to be removed from circulation. The men ran back and forth, in shiny boots. There were ashes and fragments of burning paper in the air. More and more books were thrown on the fire, books by Freud and Reich and Havelock Ellis: dangerous books, degenerate books, books that dared spell out a lexicon of bodily delights.”

— Olivia Laing

100. “This is the thing about cities, the way that even indoors you’re always at the mercy of a stranger’s gaze.”

— Olivia Laing