Alone With You in the Ether Quotes

“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

“Things were always stranger in retrospect, which was a funny little consequence of time.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Sometimes I feel like I'm just waiting for something that will never happen," he said. "Like I'm just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I'm just wasting space, or because if I don' answer the phone my dad will he alone. But it's an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don't know, nothing. Like I'm just an algorithm that someone put in place.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He would come to share her joys until he could no longer separate them from his own, and then one day, maybe turning to her at a party or rushing to ask in a text message, he would say: What's that thing I like? And she would know the answer. She would know everything.
Eventually, all the answers to all that he was would be cradled in the palms of her hands.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“For Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Art is something we do to feel human, not because we are.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“When Aldo spoke of Regan his voice had a tendency to change, illumination rising near his cheeks. "You should see her work," he would say the same way someone else might have said: Come outside, come look at the stars.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“this night is stolen, I want grand larceny and this is petty theft.”
― 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.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She'd given him arrows and he'd shot, and now parts of her were gaping holes, flayed and filleted and left behind as open wounds.”
― 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 pealed 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

“The thing about pills, Regan wanted to say to the doctor who had clearly never taken any, was that the ups and downs still happened; they were just different now, contained within brackets of limitation. Some inner lawlessness was still there, screeching for a higher high and clawing for a lower low, but ultimately the pills were loose restraints, a method of numbly shrinking”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She stared at herself in the mirror and thought: My eyes are too big, everyone will know I've seen everything, they'll know I saw the universe itself. They will look at me and they'll think: This poor girl, she knows too much, she can't go back.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It isn't pretty, he wanted to say, it's lonely, it's desolate, it's a chilling portrait of vastness. How ignorant are you to look at this and diminish it to some kind of trinket, are you dead? It's the human condition! It's the entire universe itself! It's the depths of spacetime you utter fucking philistine and how dare you, how fucking dare you stand there and fail to weep? What kind of sad, unremarkable nothingness have you so callously lived that you can witness the splendor of her existence and not fall to your knees for having missed it, for having misunderstood it all this time? Pretty, that's what you think this is? You think that's all she's capable of? You fool, she's done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to filly focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn't, its Truth. She told the Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so pitilessly. So carelessly. With the vacuous deficiency of, Oh, this is pretty.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“he was gripped with terror, understanding now what it really meant to love something. That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore lo love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“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

“She couldn't look away from his face, which did not say: What's wrong with you? but instead, said: Hi. Hello. Nice to meet you.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“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.”
― 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.”
― 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

“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 wanted to bear his entire sadness for him: to hurt herself doubly, just to keep it from him, and was that illness or love? Was she really so broken that she wanted to suffer to spare him, and if that was true, then had he been right all along?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He matched her distance again, their foreheads meeting like old friends; Hello, how are you, been a long time, how nice it is to be here with you.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It's a fire. I used to burn out, now I just burn.”
― 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 were alone in the ether...?" "Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“the truth is that I have no choice but to accept that what's in my head is what's real.”
― 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

“That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether