Crudo Quotes

“You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don't, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any little thing, the wrong kind of touch or tone, a lack of speed in answering a question, a particular cast of expression will send you into apoplexy because you are unchill, because you have not learnt how to soften your borders, how to make room. You're selfish and rigid and absorbed, you're like an infant.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Ten years ago, maybe even five, it was possible to ignore atrocities, to believe that these things happened somewhere else, in a different order of reality from your own. Now, perhaps because of the internet, it was like the blind spot had got very small, and motional like a marble. You couldn't rely on it. You could go on holiday but you knew corpses washed up there, if not now then then, or later.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“They were that kind of family, estranged, huge upholstered couches of absolute silence between them.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“People weren’t sane anymore, which didn’t mean they were wrong. Some sort of cord between action and consequence had been severed. Things still happened, but not in any sensible order, it was hard to talk about truth because some bits were hidden, the result or maybe the cause, and anyway the space between them was full of misleading data, nonsense and lies.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“What did people know, what were they ignorant of? This was the problem with history, it was too easy to provide the furnishings but forget the attitudes, the way you became a different person according to what knowledge was available, what experiences were fresh and what had not yet arisen in a personal or global frame.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“What a waste, what a crime to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, hated living at the end of the world, but then she couldn't help but find it interesting, watching people herself included compulsively foul their nest.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“She missed the sense of time as something serious and diminishing, she didn't like living in the permanent present of the id.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“What a
waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of
different kinds of flowers.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“You cannot be immune to downfall, loss and dirt, Kathy knew, but sometimes an afternoon is separate, its own gold sphere.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“It was beginning to seem like the world might be about to end. Enjoy August, she read on a site she'd only opened to read a book review: conspiracy theorists say it might be your last month on Earth.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Obama. Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beached somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn’t quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its eyes.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Love is the world, pain is the world.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“...esas exigencias no se le daban bien, no era hábil, sería una de esas mujeres que pasaban de la familia y prodigaban toda su atención al perro. Se sentía vacía. Se sentía vacía y moderadamente histérica, tenía el antojo de hacer algo, pero no sabía muy bien qué.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“It wasn't a feeling that had a source, except in the way the source of hay fever is flowers.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“She waited for her flight. She loved him, she loved him. Love is the world, pain is the world. She was in it now, she was boarding, there was nowhere to hide.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Who gave a fuck, Kathy thought, no one liked Putin, likeability was irrelevant, what mattered was whether you could make people numb enough to change all the laws, change the entire system, that was the game. Once you pardoned a corrupt sheriff who'd openly run 'concentration camps' for Latinos you were probably well on the way.
Numbness mattered, it was what the Nazis did, made people feel like things were moving too fast to stop and though unpleasant and eventually terrifying and appalling, were probably impossible to do anything about.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beach somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the whole problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before segueing proudly into an account of taking a plane across America so the writer could cheer herself up by seeing monarch butterflies. On the plane she complained about the air pollution of jet fuel and perfume, how it gave her allergies, but she didn't connect the casual habit of flying thousands of miles with the collapse of the butterflies. Kathy didn't blame her. The equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn't quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its own eyes.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“She never wanted to say another bad word, though she did twice most days, especially when hungry or tired. Could you learn to be peaceful?”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“She was bored, she wanted novelty and heat, she wanted to unhook herself”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“What a waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, living at the end of the world, but then she couldn’t help but find it interesting, watching people herself included compulsively foul their nest.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Was this getting older? Kathy was worried about ageing, she hadn’t realised youth wasn’t a permanent state, that she wouldn’t always be cute and hopeless and forgivable.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Wants go so deep there is no way of getting them out of the body, she’d written in the final paragraph of her last book.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Kathy had no parents, which didn’t stop them annoying her. She thought about them a lot.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“The light wasn’t concentrated in the sun, it was everywhere at once, like being inside a halogen bulb.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“... her body was an inhospitable territory she could never get out of.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Stories like that displaced her, they displaced everything, how could you be happy when you knew the tendencies humans had, their aptitude for cruelty.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“and yet she’d found herself pleased to hear his poems, like someone wiggling a key in the lock of language, it’s jammed, it’s jammed, and then abruptly stepping through.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Each day she sensed something creeping nearer. If it was happening to someone, it being unspeakable violence, how could she be happy: the real question of existence. The knowledge was a splinter in her own corporeality. Would this be a moment she looked back on later, damaged in an alley or locked in a cell? Something was approaching. Kathy could not settle. She knew. She knew.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“Nunca antes había amado a nadie, no de verdad. Nunca había sabido hacerlo, cómo abrirse, cómo hacerle sitio a otra persona, cómo ser generosa. Miró a su marido, su cara vieja y querida, su cara nueva y querida, solo para ella. Él la besó con fuerza tres veces y entró en el ascensor, y ella no apartó la vista hasta que la puerta lo borró.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo

“He read last, and when he got to a line about an entire bowl she gasped. Every word came out clean. We're a monstrous pair of crows, devoted to a single being.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo