Top 120 Olivia Laing Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I was aware of a gathering anxiety around the question of visibility. I wanted to be seen, taken in and accepted, the way one is by a lover’s approving gaze. At the same time I felt dangerously exposed, wary of judgement, particularly in situations where being alone felt awkward or wrong, where I was surrounded by couples or groups.”

— Olivia Laing

102. “I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder, and I’m amazed that we’re not running amok in the streets and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.”

— Olivia Laing

103. “The problem with psychotherapy was that the patient was treated as if their pain were happening in a vacuum, without the participation of the society in which they exist or the politics that defines their life.”

— Olivia Laing

104. “She waited for her flight. She loved him, she loved him. Love is the world, pain is the world. She was in it now, she was boarding, there was nowhere to hide.”

— Olivia Laing

105. “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

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

— Olivia Laing

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Olivia Laing

113. “Damaged people made damaged worlds.”

— Olivia Laing

114. “You can’t think about people like Darger, or Solanas, for that matter, without thinking too about the damage society wreaks upon individuals: the role that structures like families and schools and governments play in any single person’s experience of isolation.”

— Olivia Laing

115. “The stopped time of a painting, say, or the drawn-out minutes and compressed years of a novel, in which it is possible to see patterns and consequences that are otherwise invisible.”

— Olivia Laing

116. “The Argonauts is about these small, miraculous domestic dramas, and the acts of readjustment and care that they require, but it is also a reconsideration of what the institutions established around sexuality and reproduction mean if you come at them slant, if you disrupt them by the very fact of your being. Evictions and exclusions keep occurring.”

— Olivia Laing

117. “Had trouble again with twine. Mad enough to wish I was a bad tornado. Swore at God.’ 18.”

— Olivia Laing

118. “It was beginning to seem like the world might be about to end. Enjoy August, she read on a site she’d only opened to read a book review: conspiracy theorists say it might be your last month on Earth.”

— Olivia Laing

119. “Leyson explained his behaviour as an act of love. ‘That’s how I express myself – in a strange way – express my regard and admiration for Miss Garbo. It’s an overwhelming desire on my part, something I cannot control.”

— Olivia Laing

120. “What does freedom mean? Who is it for? What role does the state play in its preservation or curtailment? Can it be achieved by asserting the rights of the body, or, as the painter Agnes Martin believed, by denying the body altogether?”

— Olivia Laing

121. “How an individual can survive within an antagonistic society, a society that might plausibly want them dead rather than tolerate their existence. It’s passionately in favour of diversity; acutely aware of how isolating a homogeneous world can be.”

— Olivia Laing

122. “I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded, until I was flooded by superfluity. I wanted to hypnotise myself with data, with coloured pixels, to become vacant, to overwhelm any creeping anxious sense of who I actually was, to annihilate my feelings.”

— Olivia Laing

123. “Fear contaminates everything.”

— Olivia Laing

124. “I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.”

— Olivia Laing

125. “The sensation arises because of a felt absence or insufficiency of closeness, and its feeling tone ranges from discomfort to chronic, unbearable pain.”

— Olivia Laing

126. “Garbo said she wanted to be alone, that famous line, but what the real Miss Garbo desired was to be left alone, a very different thing: as in unbothered, unwatched, unharried. What she longed for was privacy, the experience of drifting unobserved.”

— Olivia Laing

127. “Every city is a place of disappearances, but Manhattan is an island, and to reinvent itself must literally bulldoze the past.”

— Olivia Laing

128. “Contrary to what the white supremacists might think, claiming the right to deny other people their liberty is not a freedom movement, and nor is refusing to wear a mask designed to protect other people’s health.”

— Olivia Laing

129. “Loneliness triggered by virtual exclusion is just as painful as that which arises out of real life encounters: a miserable rush of emotion that almost every person on the internet has experienced at one time or another.”

— Olivia Laing

130. “It seemed to me that they testified not just to a way of life, but also to the experience of feeling different, cut off, incapable of confessing real feelings: imprisoned, in short, as well as liberated by a mask.”

— Olivia Laing

131. “No, I don’t want any clothes, I don’t want anything, I just want to get out of here,′ she whimpers, and he jerks her arm, saying, ‘Judy, do this for me.’ I watched that scene again and again, wanting to drain it of its power. It’s the spectacle of a woman being forced to participate in the perpetual, harrowing, non-consensual beauty pageant of femininity, of being made to confront her status as an object that might or might not be deemed acceptable, capable of arousing the eye.”

— Olivia Laing

132. “None of these drawings show crowds, of course, though the crowd is surely the signature sight of the city. Instead they focus on the experience of isolation: of people alone or in awkward, uncommunicative couples. It’s the same limited and voyeuristic view that Alfred Hitchcock would later subject James Stewart to in the Hopperesque Rear Window, a film that is likewise about the dangerous visual intimacy of urban living, of being able to survey strangers inside what were once private chambers.”

— Olivia Laing

133. “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

134. “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

135. “It’s ironic that Manhattan is becoming a kind of gated island for the superrich, when one considers that in the 1970s it was closer to a gated prison for the poor, its reputation as a dangerzone.”

— Olivia Laing

136. “When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.”

— Olivia Laing