Book

The Lonely City

: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism#1 Book of the Year from Brain PickingsNamed a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers

(8 total)

Characters

Olivia Laing (8)

“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 by 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,…”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Loneliness, Being human, Quote of the Moment, Good writing, Alone

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings -- depression, anxiety,…”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Depression, Anxiety, emotions, Loneliness, Mortality

“I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated, I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space. I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded, until I was flooded by superfluity. I wanted to hypnotize myself with data, with colored pix…”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Twitter, Social Media, Technology, The Digital Age

“What did it mean to have AIDS at that time, when diagnosis was an almost certain death sentence? It meant being perceived as a monster, an object of terror even to medical personnel. It meant being trapped in a body that was regarded as repellent, toxic, unpredictable and dangerous.”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: AIDS, HIV, Stigma, Health, disease

“Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the same that grows like thorns around it.”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Feelings, Shame

“There is no substitute for touch, no substitute for love, but reading about someone else's commitment to discovering and admitting their desires was so deeply moving that I sometimes found I was physically shaking as I read.”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Loneliness, Touch, Love, Good writing, Books

“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, amazon.com

Tagged: Loneliness, Quote of the Moment

“My life felt very empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about a stained or threadbare piece of clothing.”

— Olivia Laing, amazon.com

Tagged: Loneliness, Good writing