Top 120 Olivia Laing Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Olivia Laing

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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. “Damaged people made damaged worlds.”

— Olivia Laing

120. “Fear contaminates everything.”

— Olivia Laing

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Olivia Laing

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Olivia Laing

132. “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

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

— 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