C.C.

“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: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Tv’s “real” agenda is to be “liked,” because if you like what you’re seeing, you’ll stay tuned. tv is completely unabashed about this; it’s its sole raison.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Idealists can be quite a problem when they get disgusted with themselves.”
― J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

“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.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone