Funny Weather Quotes

“We're so often told that art can't really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.”
― Olivia Laing , Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“A useful analogy for what [Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick] calls 'reparative reading' is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn't mean being naïve or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“You can’t paint reality: you can only paint your own place in it, the view from your eyes, as manifested by your own hands.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder, and I’m amazed that we’re not running amok in the streets and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“A paranoid reader is concerned with gathering information, tracing links and making the hidden visible. They anticipate and are perennially defended against disaster, catastrophe, disappointment. They are always on the lookout for danger, about which they can never, ever know enough.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“A useful analogy for what she calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“The stopped time of a painting, say, or the drawn-out minutes and compressed years of a novel, in which it is possible to see patterns and consequences that are otherwise invisible.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“Fiction can do that: can make a space for reflecting, for generating novel ways of responding and reacting to lies and guns and walls alike. The mere act of cracking open a book, Smith thinks, is creative in itself, capable of inculcating kindness and agility in the reader. ‘Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s like being given the world, its darks and lights. At which point we can go about the darks and lights with our imagination energised”
- Olivia Laing, Funny Weather”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“In terms of her painting, never mind the innovations she brought to bear on her private life, she forged a passage to a world of openness and freedom, as frightening as it was exhilarating.
'I've always been absolutely terrified every single moment of my life,' she said, 'and I've never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do,”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“What drives all these essays is a long-standing interest in how a person can be free, and especially in how to find a freedom that is shareable, and not dependent upon the oppression or exclusion of other people.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“I’ve always been absolutely terrified every single moment of my life,’ she said, ‘and I’ve never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“We're so often told that art can't really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living. Don't you want it, to be impregnate with all that light? And what will happen if you are?”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it's up to you.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“These narratives are interesting in and of themselves, but Nelson isn’t just airing her feelings out. She’s bent on using these experiences as ways of prying the culture open, of investigating what it is that’s being so avidly defended and policed. Binaries, mostly: the overwhelming need, to which the left is no more immune than the right, for categories to remain pure and unpolluted. Gay people marrying or becoming pregnant, individuals migrating from one gender to another, let alone refusing to commit to either, occasions immense turbulence in thought systems that depend upon orderly separation and partition, which is part of the reason that the trans-rights movement has proved so depressingly threatening to certain quarters of feminist thought.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“The Argonauts is about these small, miraculous domestic dramas, and the acts of readjustment and care that they require, but it is also a reconsideration of what the institutions established around sexuality and reproduction mean if you come at them slant, if you disrupt them by the very fact of your being. Evictions and exclusions keep occurring.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“Capitalism, he wrote in "Ways of Seeing," survives by forcing the majority to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. It was narrowness he set himself against, the toxic impulse to wall in or wall off. Be generous to the strange, be open to difference, cross-pollinate freely.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“It takes work to insist on being a major character, even in one's own existence. Levy draws repeatedly on Simone de Beauvoir and James Baldwin, allies in the dissident act of making yourself heard, of choosing a mode of living that doesn't require you to participate in your own diminishment.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“When I prowled the easels in the break, what I saw was always the same: outline, skin bag, the more or less improbable architecture of the human form. Legs, fingers, nose. It was what my body looked like, sure, but not anything like how it felt to live inside it. There are two bodies, aren't there? The one you see in magazines, the one that is available to strangers' eyes, and the one you inhabit, the leaky vessel, permeable and expulsive, prone to rents and fractures; a factory, slippery and bilious, its secret compartments stained rose madder and Chinese red.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“How to live on alongside loss and rage[?] How to not be destroyed by what are manifestly destructive forces[?]”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“a work of conceptual art before conceptual art had been conceived.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“Difference is a source of glamour and not of shame.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“be together. not the same.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is, it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it's like being given the world, its darks and lights. At which point we can go about the darks and lights with our imagination energised”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“She´s fascinated by the stubbornness of art, its capacity to outlive its creator, to float.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“So maybe they saw reality for what it was, whereas I thought it was elsewhere.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“Words jumped out of him, from the back of cereal boxes or subway ads, and he stayed alert to their subversive properties, their double and hidden meaning.

Olivia Laing about Basquiat”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency