Alone With You in the Ether Quotes

“It wasn’t conflicted, and it certainly wasn’t dramatic; he’d already seen every shade of Regan’s highs and lows. Sometimes she was a marvel, brilliant, creative, witty; sometimes merely predictable, spoiled, manic, vain. It was never particularly cruel, but it was always honest.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“What did you learn?” he asked neutrally.
That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She knew, after all, which of his motions looked practiced and which of them did not. He wasn’t accustomed to someone being this close to him. This was visibly unrehearsed.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It occurred to her that Aldo Damiani was probably something of a rarity himself.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He was definitely doing math, and she reveled in her possession of it; in being the instrument to channel his thoughts.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She understood the compulsion to seek out more space. To lessen to a speck of nothingness.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Because if you don’t have something to figure out, then you have no reason to keep going?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I’m not trying to predict you. I’m trying to understand you.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“You’re telling his side of the story,” Aldo pointed out. “I asked for yours.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She hated all scenarios preceding the assumption that someone could predict her taste. Either they thought it universal enough that she could be lumped in with masses or they thought (usually incorrectly) that they understood her specific needs, and she wasn’t sure which crime was worse.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It’s art because it’s art, which is circular in its way,” she said, and then blinked, that same half-smile lingering at the edges of her mouth when she turned to face him. “A perfect circle, if you will,” she said, “because it is and it was and it will be, all at once.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He felt confident that there would be a moment when all the disjointed parts that made Charlotte Regan so incomprehensible to him would form a recognizable shape, and then he would understand the basis of the problem.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I think it’s unrealistic to expect truth all the time.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I don’t think we’re really capable of loving the things our parents love.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He seemed to see the world through some lens of necessity, as if everything was purely reflex.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He scanned her again, the effect of it intensely asexual and certainly aromantic.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I bet you’ve never gone along with someone else’s idea in your life.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He said everything with precisely the same degree of unambiguous fact that he’d used to address everything else.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He seemed intensely uninterested in talking about himself, which was half the reason she’d brought it up. She’d spent enough time looking too closely at things to know when she was the one being clinically observed.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“she struck him as the sort of person who had a very clear idea what other people hoped to get.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Science requires a control group. A known lie,” he clarified, “to compare against possible lies.” “And why would you need a control group?” Seemed obvious to him. “Because I want to know when you’re lying to me.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Regan suspected that Marc liked her a little broken; he liked expressing concern for her health, because caring for her made her grateful to him and therefore secured her as one of his treasures.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Regan always felt most secure in the hands of a man with no misconceptions of her flaws, because for better or worse, he would not be swayed by the possibility of their resurgence.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“... Above him were stars. Beneath him was grass. There was wonder here, even if Regan no longer saw it. Even if she no longer felt it, he would feel it for both of them. he would translate it for her later. He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it. She seemed to appreciate things she could see. He thought of her gaze traveling over the scars on his shoulders, taking him in. Yes, he would draw it for her, and thens he would see it. She would watch it take shape and he would know he'd said it ina way she could understand, and then she would know that even things, with its ordinary features, was wonder and glory too.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“In her experience, curiosity about a person was never a good sign. Curiosity was unspeakably worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction. Curiosity usually meant a kindling of something highly flammable, which wasn’t at all what Regan wanted from this.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Damiani likes argumentation, or at least seems to respect it in like, an ADHD kind of way. Even if your opinion is bullshit, he’ll like you more if it’s thoughtful enough.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He was a mystery, which was interesting. He never quite did or said what she thought he was going to, though that could become its own kind of predictable after a while.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It isn’t constancy that keeps us alive, it’s the progression we use to move us.
Because everything is always the same until, very suddenly, it isn’t.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Aldo could be patient with the concept of nothing. Emptiness repulsed Regan, filling her with abject terror, but the concept of zero was something that Aldo had come to accept.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Regan believes there are two ways to manipulate a man: either to let him pursue you or to let him pursue you in a way that makes him feel he’s the pursuit.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether