The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

by Olivia Laing

it didn’t take much to shatter the illusion of self-forgetfulness,

We cannot think without language, and language is by its nature a public game, both in terms of acquisition and transmission.

Sometimes you can change the psychic space, the landscape of the emotions, by carrying out actions in the physical world.

I don’t know about you but if I was asked to put everything I own in a small room in someone else’s house, I might well look like a hoarder. Although neither extreme poverty nor wealth makes one immune to craving an excess of possessions, it’s worth asking of any behaviour presented as weird or freakish whether the boundary being transgressed is class, not sanity at all.

conditions are not always ideal for the painful process of reuniting the warring impulses of love and hatred. A weak or damaged ego cannot integrate, because it is too afraid of being overwhelmed by destructive feelings, which threaten to endanger or annihilate the prized and carefully preserved good object.

Fear is contagious, converting latent prejudice into something more dangerous.

No one I knew would admit to liking Craigslist, but I always found it weirdly cheering. The unashamed display of need, the sheer range and specificity of things that people wanted was far more reassuring and democratic than the preening, exacting profiles that appeared on the more sanitised dating sites.