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#the lonely city
soracities · 1 year
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Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
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funeral · 3 months
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The idea that language is a game at which some players are more skilled than others has a bearing on the vexed relationship between loneliness and speech. 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
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asoftepiloguemylove · 5 months
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LOVE IS A FEAST BUT YOU'VE LEARNED TO ABSTAIN; ON LONELINESS THAT EATS YOU ALIVE
Bob Schofield WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ABOUT LOVE WITH PLENTY OF CITATIONS (via @masoeuretmoi) // Phoebe Bridgers Moon Song // Olivia Laing The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone // Xooang Choi (via @larameeee) // Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov // Ocean Vuong Thanksgiving 2006
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virginiewoolf · 2 years
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Olivia Laing, from The Lonely City.
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declanscunt · 1 year
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ADAM PARRISH — LONESOME
blue lily lily blue — maggie stiefvater // the book of disquiet — fernando pessoa // succession (2018), s3 ep9 (x) // the lonely city — olivia laing // sex education (2019), s2 ep2 // little weirds — jenny slate // little women (2019) // this song will save your life — leila sales // call down the hawk — maggie stiefvater
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modern-girl · 1 year
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The Art of Being Alone
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shirleyjacksonesque · 3 months
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LONELINESS + the lonely city by olivia laing & hanif abdurraqib
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footnoteinhistory · 1 year
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“There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.”
–Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Lonely (New York: Picador, 2016)
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robertcapajpg · 2 years
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I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted. 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.
The lonely city, Olivia Laing
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mangoslixes · 2 months
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Much of her work explores her relationship with them (leaving behind her artist parents – her greatest creative inspiration), but also her learning to live without them. “I feel strongly about the difficulty of separation and the strength we grow from solitudes,” Irene says. In June of this year she spent a month in Seattle, and created the series Seattle Diary. Depicting bakery queues, lone diners, picnics and bookshops, Irene familiarised herself with the city through drawing; the process helped her learn how to “be alone” rather than “lonely”, navigating the experience as a solo traveller.
on Irene Chung
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llovelymoonn · 2 years
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on loneliness as hunger
olivia laing the lonely city (via @morepeachyogurt) \\ rachel ingalls mrs. caliban (via @araekni) \\ yves olade dark when it gets dark: “topograph” (via @muguetdemai​) \\ victoria chang obit (via @feral-ballad)
kofi
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soracities · 1 year
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Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
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funeral · 3 months
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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. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
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asoftepiloguemylove · 9 months
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hi!! i was wondering if you could do a web weave on feeling unloveable but in the romantic sense? like in the way where you’re one to have really great platonic and familial relationships but when it comes to craving and seeking a romantic connection it’s like everyone wants absolutely nothing to do with you all of a sudden
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Olivia Laing The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone / unknown / Margaret Atwood / Taylor Steele Shocker / unknown / pinterest / Sierra DeMulder Today Means Amen
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On loneliness as hunger
The Lonely City, Olivia Laing//Alive at the End of the World, Saeed Jones//Faithless, Joyce Carol Oates
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literaryruin · 11 months
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In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.
- Except from David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives, as mentioned by Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, pp. 133.
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