THE GENTRIFICATION OF EMOTIONS

'There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

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 see to afflict us are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.' 

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.280. 

FAME - THE NEW INTIMACY

'...fame; intimacy's surrogate, its addictive supplanter.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.244.

INTIMACY & SELF-ESTEEM

'...intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.241.

SOCIAL MEDIA & RELATIONSHIPS

'The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.227. 

LONELINESS & INTIMACY

'If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can't exist if the participants aren't willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don't communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and the major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone's arm and blurt the whole thing out...'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.75.

LONELINESS AS A PHYSICAL FEELING

'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, p.11.

URBAN LONELINESS

'You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet the the mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It's possible - easy, even - to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others. Hardly any wonder, then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, p.3.