Alone With You in the Ether Quotes

“You are not in love with Rinaldo Damiani whose hair smells like Sunday morning in the sun, you do not even know him, he doesn’t know you. You can rest your hands on the scars of his shoulders and long to rid him of every breath of pain and still, you will not be in love with him, because this isn’t love. Love is a home and a mortgage and the promise of permanence; love is measured and paced, and this, the too-hasty sprint of your pulse, that’s drugs. You know drugs, don’t you, Charlotte? Euphoria can be bottled, it can be smoked, it will dissolve on your tongue and burn through the vacant cavity of your empty fucking chest. His hands on you, that can be preserved, it can be painted, it can be committed to the canvas of your imagination, and it can stay in the vaults of your private longings, your little reveries, your twisted dreams.”
― 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 then she would see it. She would watch it take shape and he would know he’d said it in a way she could understand, and then she would know that even this, with its ordinary features, was wonder and glory, too.
He didn’t blame her for not seeing it. He blamed everyone else for letting her forget.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Regan”— Charlotte, he reminded himself too late, but dismissed it as a foregone error—“isn’t just difficult, she’s convoluted. She’s contradictory—honest even when she lies,” he offered as an example, “and rarely the same version twice. She’s confounding, really intricate. Infinite.” That was the word, he thought, clinging to it once he found it. “She’d have to be measured infinitely in order to be calculated, which no one could ever do.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“If I’d known I would meet Charlotte Regan in the morning, maybe I would have gotten some fucking sleep.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“They see you closer than you are, but you’re further from reach than either you or they can imagine.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“People thought addiction was a craving, but the difference was this: Cravings were wishes that could be satisfied, but compulsions were needs that must be met.”
― 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

“Sometimes,” she said, “when I’m with someone else, I get this feeling like I’m asleep.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“That’s a cycle,” he said, “not a circle,” but he understood what she meant.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“The dark tips of her nails traveled the shape of his upper lip, curving with it, and in another version of this precise moment, he said, Regan, come closer, let's see what happens, let's see how the stars shine on your skin”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spider palms, and still feel empty-handed.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but it isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“His name is written on my skin, he scarred me, I've changed my entire shape for having fit within the enormity of his thoughts, and now the only words I know are lines and color”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Regan’s consistent unreachability was once a carefully honed practice that had gradually become a habit. When Regan was younger, she had coveted the prospect of a call or a text; it meant, primarily, attention. It meant that she had filled the vacancy of someone else’s thoughts. Then, after a while, she began to understand that there was power in devaluing her worth to others. She started to place limits on herself; she wouldn’t check her phone for ten minutes. Then for twenty. Eventually she’d space hours between, making a point to direct her thoughts elsewhere. If others were forced to wait for her time, she thought, then she would not have to owe so much of herself to them. Now, Regan is so very talented at being completely unreliable that people have”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“He had those eyes, Regan supposed, and that mouth, and for better or worse, he had all the strangeness that fell out of it. Part of Regan irrationally resented the girl for not knowing that Aldo Damiani was closest to handsome when he was talking about bees.”
― olivie blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It was more like there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it, less like a piece fitting into the vacancy of another and more like liquid being poured into a cup.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It’s like you woke up something inside me and it won’t be quiet. It refuses to calm down, and why should it? It’s not like ‘Oh, you make me happy,’ it’s not something as clichéd as that. 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

“I came to look at art, to marvel at something, and here you are and so I will.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something to happen. 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 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

“Sometimes I feel like I'm just waiting for something to 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 (...). 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

“For boys, sex is a part of life, a rite of passage. Boys look at porn when they’re twelve, thirteen! Boys get to have sex just as it is, just sex. Girls are taught fairy tales, they’re taught happily ever after , they’re taught sex as a consequence of marriage. Imagine seeing the world that way, as if sex isn’t a right but a rung on a ladder. We have to withhold it, can you imagine that? Because it’s so brainless and simple that if men get it too easily, they’ll just leave. Because really, how the fuck is my vagina different from any other woman’s? No, the thing that makes me different is somewhere else, literally anywhere else, but I can’t enjoy sex without some archaic sociological risk. And if you think about that it’s even worse, because look at the vagina, Aldo. It can have infinite orgasms. It doesn’t require any recovery time. It can come and come and come and what, maybe it gets dry? Lube it up again, easy. If any sexual organ is omnipotent it’s the fucking cunt but no, penises are the ones who get to decide whether a woman has value. Who let that happen? Really, Aldo, who? Maybe this is why men rule the world, because they were clever enough to convince women that virginity is precious, that sex itself should be secret, that being penetrated was sacrosanct. It’s idiotic, it’s even dumber than it is cruel and that’s the worst part. The idea that I should want sex less than you, why does that exist?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Boys get to have sex just as it is, just sex. Girls are taught fairy tales, they're taught happily ever after. they're taught sex as a consequence of marriage. Imagine seeing the world that way, as if sex isn't a right but a rung on a ladder. We have to withhold it, can you imagine that? Because its so brainless and simple that if men get it too easily, they'll just leave.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“As pessoas achavam que o vício era uma vontade, mas a diferença era a seguinte: vontades eram desejos possíveis de satisfazer, ao passo que compulsões eram necessidades que precisavam ser atendidas.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“that the inside of your head must require a specific set of keys.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“I don’t really have a personality conducive to long-term relationships.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“Yes it does, he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“Because,” she said. Because I know he’ll sit for me. Because I know he won’t mock me, won’t suffocate me, won’t kill 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

“Yes, a friend.” 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