Alone With You in the Ether Quotes

“Where are we in the cosmos, because I have lived this so many times in fantasy that it has become six different forms of reality and now, tell me, which reality are we?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“thank you for the shape you took in my life but it’s over now, it doesn’t fit.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Aldo contemplated going back to live in that single second of time, when he and she had existed in perfect synchronicity.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Well, if time really was a trap and I was on some sort of predetermined course, that would be a relief,” she said. “The idea that I might have options or other time-spaces to occupy is a little overwhelming.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Art, a voice buzzed in her ear, was creation. It was dissecting a piece of herself and leaving it out for consumption, for speculation. For the possibility of misinterpretation and the inevitability of judgment. For the abandonment of fear the reward would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice. That, her mind whispered, was art”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Because I know he’ll sit for me. Because I know he won’t mock me, won’t suffocate me, won’t kill this this fragile little thing I’ve found, this fledgling breath I’ve taken. Because he will know what it means, because he asked me to, because he asked. Because he’s the thing I can’t unsee. Because I don’t know if I can get him right without looking, without proof, but also because I need to know, because I’ve already tried. Because either this is how everything changes, or this is how it ends.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She used to dream like that, in nothing but lines and patterns and textures. Art was a language of both limitless vocabulary and limited syntax; endless concepts to express with boundless opportunities to express them, but only a finite number of ways to do it. Color, line, shape, space, texture, and value, six elements in total, which was newly revelatory to her until she realized why, running her finger along the edge of the key.
Bees.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“You and me, you and me, you and me, Aldo, Aldo, Rinaldo, I am more addicted to the thought of your name on my tongue than I am to any other form of vice. The thought of having you is more dangerous than any cocktail of drugs, the idea of belonging to you endlessly destructive.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Then, for the first time in three years, four months, and fifteen days, Charlotte Regan began to paint.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Her art would not satisfy him because it wasn’t art at all, wasn’t anything. Art was emotional truth and she had none of that, not one single truth, and this bag was proof of it along with everything else.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She felt a mix of things, soft and hard. Things were compacting and expanding inside her. They’d been there before she’d entered the room, but now that she had left it, she felt exactly the same only worse. The same, only more so.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“These keys of mine,” she said. “If you could have one of them.”
It was an implied question: If you could open only one part of me for your consumption, for your delectation, for the whims of your carnivorous mind, which part would you wish to see?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Those eyes in real life were weapons, or possibly anti-weapons. They had kept her out of prison, he was sure of it. Wide-set and oversized and almond-shaped, little picture-boxes of innocence. Frames that made a mockery of everything concealed within.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“With the way moonlight fell over them it seemed to him that they were each one half of a person, divided in two, each fraction left to be the other’s reflection.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. It’s the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It’s him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he’ll be a specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now. This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you’ve always understood that. You’ve always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Everyone sees through you. Everyone sees through you and on the other side of you is the way life looks without you, and inevitably they will run straight for it with relief.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Bees are for you.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“People were so easily desensitized, so helplessly numbed when it came to the repetitive nature of existence.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I think you can be physically involved with someone before you need them,” he said slowly. “And I think you can need them before you love them.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I think,” he said, “that the inside of your head must require a specific set of keys.”
“A whole set of them?”
“Oh, almost definitely,” he replied. “I think that, for someone to get close to you, you must have to give them one key at a time. And even then, only one level can be opened at once.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Sometimes Aldo thought a fall was precisely what he was waiting for.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“l’appel du vide , the call of the void”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She had a need, several needs, that she could never manage to extinguish. But people didn’t like needy, so she’d learned to transform it. To bury it, cleverly disguised, in someone whose compulsions matched hers. Complementary shapes into fitting pieces.
Flaws, she thought, were just vacancies to be filled.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“That old reflex never died; the little pang of Don’t go, just stay. Settle over me like the tide, cover me like a blanket, wrap around me like the sun.
Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“There was a perpetual imbalance between them that she knew they both understood. She’d been so close to nothing when he’d found her that she would spend their entire relationship owing him something, or everything, just for staying when any reasonable person would have left. It wasn’t wholly unromantic. Actually it was, perversely so. Even when the heat of sex died away there would still be some underlying sense of kinship; an understanding that Marc was shitty with his charming flaws of vice, but Regan would always be shittier, selfish and mercurial and vain. Complimentary pieces in a perfect, shitty puzzle, where she was the broken one and he was normal. She would always be sick and he would always be fine.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“His mind retraced the shape of her touch, replicating its patterns and shapes; linking observations together. The speed of her hesitation. The force of her breath. He turned her over in his head, facts and details and observations, wrapping his mind around her the way his fingers had done.
Then he turned the vacuum on, permitting the sound to drown him out.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Focus looked right on her, vibrant and bright.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She had a distinct ability to take up space, he thought. She made her surroundings part of her dominion, her atmosphere bending to the strike of her stride. Aldo, on the other hand, was typically subjected to the laws and customs of the room.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She’d crave a senseless rage, a dried-up sob, a psychotic joy, but find only pulse after pulse of nothing.
Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether