If you’re looking for Olivia Laing quotes about loneliness, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people. And in this article we share a list of the 10 most interesting quotes about loneliness by Olivia Laing. Let’s get inspired!
Olivia Laing quotes about loneliness
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, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
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, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
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, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
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, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. 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. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. 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, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
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, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
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, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
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, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper’s images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as “our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness”…Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.
— Olivia Laing
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