68 Quotes by Olivia Laing

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.

Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It's work. What are does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it's up to you.

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.

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

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.

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

Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty?

That’s the dream of sex, isn’t it? That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself, at long last desired, its strange tongue understood.

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.