Alone With You in the Ether Quotes

“Regan didn’t have a lot of time or energy for the sort of love that required openness, and it made Aldo realize that the best thing he could have done to win Regan over was to immediately identify her primary truth: that she was most comfortable when she was at her falsest. Regan did not enjoy honesty. She hated it, was repulsed by it, and by her own truths especially. With other peoples’ truths she merely collected them like shiny things, tucking them away or else carrying them around, wondering where to put them.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Charlotte Regan had killed him once and she could kill him again, easily. She could kill him, and that was what Masso had feared, even if he didn’t know it. She could kill him, and now Aldo understood.
So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror. ”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Charlotte Regan, Aldo realized, loved change, unhealthily. She loved it like an obsession, like infatuation. With change she had an ongoing affair, and perhaps it had been neutralized for a time with pills and psychotherapy but underneath it all, the little monster that was her soul was clawing for it, and it had been Aldo who’d hauled it out again. He’d unleashed a titan, he’d freed her, fallen in love with her, and as much as he’d hoped it would relent to something manageable, it did not.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Aldo,” Regan said, “what’s the ether?”
“It’s what people used to believe the universe was filled with,” he said. “They believed light needed to pass through something, only Einstein proved light can be particles, which don’t need a medium to travel through. And before that,” he added, “ether was what they called the air in the realm of the gods. A shining, fluid substance.”
“So when people say we’re alone in the ether…?”
“Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”
“But,” she said, and stopped. “But the bees.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“The idea that even he didn’t recognize happiness when he felt it was comforting, in some way. She was comforted by knowing he was equally as stupid and hopeless as she was.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Aldo, I cry when it rains, I pick fights sometimes, I don’t know why. I look at the sky and feel this inexplicable sense of dread. I’m afraid that everything will end; are you ever afraid like that? No, you’re never afraid, you have numbers and thoughts and your genius to keep you warm. You don’t need me, I need you, and it will always be like that, unequal like that. I will always cling to you in gratitude and you will always be kind, you’re just made that way. You’ll let me do it but eventually I will make you unhappy, and then it will be on me to leave, because you are much too good to give me the ending we both know I deserve.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“You need to be loved, you need someone to believe you’re perfect, you hate being reminded you have flaws.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Without Aldo, Regan felt an uneasiness, a restlessness, something close to recklessness or, perhaps, far beyond it. She felt a vibrating sense of blankness, like the buzz of a fluorescent sign. Closed, open, vacancy, no vacancy. She felt like a door swinging open and shut, things coming and going, and she was merely the operator saying, Hold please.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I worry that if you try to keep up with her, you’ll burn out, Rinaldo.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She didn’t feel whole with Aldo inside her. Instead, she felt splintered; like she became, in his hands, an infinite number of pieces, an entire infinity herself. Like she and eternity and omnipotence were the same, or like omniscience could be equated to the sound of his ragged breath in her ear. She wanted him to mess her up, deplete her, to deliver her to something lesser, something baser. Something less inclined to rational thought, and instead diminished only to sensations.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“How pathetic, thinking she could simply look at a gallery of intimacy and then approximate it for arousal in her head. Funny how desire had blended with closeness in her mind; how she’d confused pure physicality for the sensation of being whole.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“This feeling, this flutter in my chest and this lightness in my bones and this flicker in my blood, this must be happiness. This must be what it feels like to be happy.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“You make me feel like I’m alive for a fucking reason. Like for once I’m not just a goddamn waste of time.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Just to make sure he could fix it the moment an unpleasant thought crossed her mind, which it didn’t, but just in case it did, he never left her.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I want you to expect—no, I want you to demand,” she amended. “I want you to demand things from me, to tell me to make this work, to force me if you have to. I want you to bet on me, Aldo. I want you to make investments, I want your future.” The last part slipped out. “I want your future, Aldo. I want it for me.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It’s not that,” she said quietly. “I just… I like us like this, I like us how we are. I don’t want them in it, around it. Near it, even.”
“You don’t want them to ruin it, you mean.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He knows her relationships are complicated. He knows whose calls she takes and which ones she ignores. He knows, as her doctor doesn’t know, that she isn’t taking her pills. He knows that she hears her mother’s voice in her head and sometimes she loses her own voice inside it; he knows she finds it again when he takes her face in his hands and says: Are you in there?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She was the hunter, not him.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“They have plenty of other times for conversations, he says, and this is when she knows—god, she knows—that she loves him so deeply and so passionately and so devastatingly that by the time she tells him, the words will inevitably feel empty and small.
The first time they argue, she is sure that she loves him.
But she doesn’t tell him so, not really, not yet.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Why should someone else get her highs and lows? He wants them all, selfishly, possessively. He wants to have them, he doesn’t have any highs or lows himself, he’s been…stuck.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“the fight they just had? It’s going to happen again, and he’s going to get sick of her and then she’s going to get sick of her but she’d rather get sick of all of her than get sick of the half-her the pills make her feel.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Maybe that’s the big secret, that even though she hates her feelings, she’d still rather have them than not. Maybe the enormity of it all is that she hates the highs and the lows and she knows they’re Bad, that they’re Not Supposed To Happen, but she is not herself without them. She misses herself. She doesn’t really know who she is but she wants to know, she wants to find out, and she can’t do it with pills. She understands that might be hard for him.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Oh, you love my brain? Well, do you love it when it does this thing, or this thing? Do you love it when it means I’m lifeless on the floor, curling my tongue around a pill or a stranger’s dick? Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent?
Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She understands what people want from her, knows when to give it or not. Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that the success of a rebellion, knowing what people want, so to vehemently deny what others so desperately desire?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Instead she thinks: I love him, and for a moment it doesn’t matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Am I the girl who stays while others leave?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“The first time they argue she is sure that she loves him. It’s the first time she really knows it, because even though her thoughts have been telling her so for days and somewhere there is a burning for him that is impossible to extinguish, she doesn’t really believe that love is anything more than science. Hormones, evolution, love, nuclear fusion, quantum theory, it’s all just a theory. It’s all just a sensation they tried to give an explanation to because humans are small, and stupid. Because people want to be romantic about everything, they want to give names to the stars, they want to tell stories. Love is a story, that’s all, until she fights with him for the first time.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Jesus, he thinks, something is wrong with us, we are unwell, no one has ever felt any of this without destruction. Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more, makes him look at his hands and think, My god, what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her. What a waste, and then he says aloud, JesusfuckingChrist what have you done to me? And she says, Kiss me.
He kisses her, thinks, Go on, ruin me. Wreck me, please.
She kisses him back and she does.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It has required more permission to kiss her lips, to share her breath, than to slide inside her pussy, to occupy her cunt.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Consumption, that’s what this is. He is being willingly eaten alive.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether