Best Of Olivia Laing's "Funny Weather"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing

[...] This doesn’t mean being naive 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.

p. 4

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?

p.8

Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.

p. 128

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, [Ali] 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 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 energized.’

p.168

“You are a Christian and I am not, but we both agree on this: kindness is what counts. So imagine a country founded on kindness, a country that treats desperate strangers with respect. And now we come to the question that haunts me. What could you have become in that good, imagined place? What would you have done with your beautiful life?”

 p. 235 from Olivia Laing’s 2016 essay/interview with an unidentified asylum-seeker in the UK, ‘The Abandoned Person’s Tale’ 

“…but I think the act of bearing witness is an act of love.”

p. 239

‘Clarity is more important than money’ 

p. 305, Laing quotes John Berger’s closing words of his acceptance speech of the 1972 Booker Prize

Capitalism, he [John Berger] 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. He put his faith in the people, the whole host of us.

p. 305

Host: there’s another curious word, lurking at the root of both hospitality and hospital. It means both the person who offers hospitality, and the group, the flock, the horde. It has two origins: the Latin for stranger or energy, and also for guest. It was Berger’s gift, I think, to see this kind of perception or judgement is always a choice, and to make a case for kindness: for being humane, whatever the cost.

p. 305-306

I think there’s a much more fearful dimension to the spoken word than the written […] there’s a possibility of being unintelligible or not being heard properly. You feel the threat of the voice being lost or not reaching the ear. The gap between the voice and the ear feels much more potent and dangerous than the gap between the written word and somebody’s eye. This is the threat that’s always there in language, that at some point it might degrade to such a point that you can’t make yourself understood any more. 

p. 329