“I was working, but I didn't have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going on through… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.” — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“Not so long ago, I spent a period in New York City, that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass, inhabiting loneliness on… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn’t part of the deal.” — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“they’d even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young” — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn't have what people were supposed… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“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… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“Loneliness is a very special place. It isn’t always easy to see the truth of Wilson’s statement, but over the course of my travels… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“When he changed his mind, very suddenly, expressing increasingly grave reservations into a series of hotel phones, I found myself adrift, stunned by the… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“Sometimes, all you need is permission to feel. Sometimes, what causes the most pain is actually the attempt to resist feeling, or the shame… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“Physically, Echo Spring is nothing more than a nickname for a liquor cabinet, drawn from the brand of bourbon it contains.” — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“As long as Frank was well, I was happy,’ he wrote in Memoirs. ‘He had a gift for creating a life and, when he… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“If I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant's wail: I don't want to be… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
“I was working, but I didn't have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back… — Olivia Laing Copy Share Image
