Alone With You in the Ether Quotes

“Because even when you know everything about how a[n art] piece is made, you're still only seeing the surface”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“we map things, he said, and chart things, observing and modeling and predicting, because we have no other choice, and this is the language we have agreed, collectively, to use. Because we have agreed, collectively, that to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that 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

“people want to be romantic about everything, they want to give names to the stars, they want to tell stories”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He smiled at her like: Isn’t it great? Yes, she thought, pained. Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“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

“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 even love me?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“can you love my brain even when it is small? when it is malovent? when it's violent? can you love it when it doesn't even love me?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“What he wants to do is get on his bike and go somewhere he can scream into empty air, where he can take a breath that is not full of her just to prove it can still mean something, just in case.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“Dad?” “You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“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?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“little fractures: Your crazy is your magic. Your wildness is what makes you. Resilience is your talent. Burn, but don’t burn out.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“So be it. This is what it means to live.”
― 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.”
― 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

“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.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“Her own hypothesis was fairly elementary: There was a single moment responsible for every sequence thereafter. Regan wasn’t the science enthusiast Aldo was—and certainly not the genius he was, either—but her view of causality was methodical enough. Everything was a consequence that rippled out from some fixed point of entry, and it had become a game of hers (probably stolen from him) to expose the genesis from which everything else had sprung.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether

“You and me together, you-and-me-together, you and me. It was a thought that woke her from slumber, like inspiration or a stomachache. It was a notion that could not be doused, couldn’t be extinguished, except by the motion of her brush. She was painting to quiet her thoughts, the way they scribbled themselves in her mind, leaping and darting like insects, alighting on different planes.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“The brushstrokes were precisely the artist’s, not hers. It was thievery in every possible aspect of its creation. She had left nothing of herself in its reproduction, merely cloning the vacant starvation that had existed there before, and then she’d done the same another dozen times; proving to herself that, at very least, she could still see, she could still think, she could still interpret.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“You and me, you-and-me, you and me, my heart will burn a hole through my chest until I know, and I am not done, I can’t be done yet, this cannot be the ending.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“There had been no mother to kiss away the pain, and now the mark of inattention would remain.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Regan didn’t want to die, obviously—nothing that emergent. She just wanted something reasonably compelling; something that would make him think about how precious time was, how every moment of it should be spent at her side, the two of them together.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“This was what Regan did to Aldo: irreparable damage to his former self. Regan was Regan, but she was also the loss of a former life to which he could never return. Of course he didn’t wish to, but that wasn’t the point. It could never exist a second time. He considered what she’d said—if it all fails, Aldo, go back and erase us, make it like we never happened—and he understood that while it would be a cruelty, it would be a kindness in equal measures. Because the old him was dead, and what existed of him now could die, too, a painful death, if he were capable of doing what she asked. What he was now, some toddler of a man learning how to breathe again, would be gone. His life before her, his life without her, the Parthenon, they would all be ancient rubble. Only stories would remain to give them value.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Wait for it, he thought, replaying it again. Wait for the blood to boil in his sad, pathetic veins. Wait for his confusion, his sense of loss. Wait for her to stare at him, lying like only she could lie, and wait for him to think, for the first time, about the way she’s never really answered a question. It was charming at first, wasn’t it? An eccentricity, an artistic detail, a golden little hexagon on the mark of what she was. It was infatuating, learning to read her, only she’s not just a problem without a solution, she’s a broken loop that can’t be fixed. Wait for him to realize it, to place things into categories in his head, and then wait for him to wonder if, while he was experiencing something special, she had ever really felt the same?
Wait for him to think, My god, she’s a forger. She’s a thief, she replicates things. Wait for him to say to himself: I am not only the same as Marc, but Marc is the same as the man before him, and the men who are the same as the men before that, and perhaps we are all counterfeit bills, recreated over and over while she cheapens our value, drains us of meaning, spends us like currency and throws us away. Wait for him to think, It’s too fast, everything is too fast—and surely he doesn’t really believe this, but how could he not, when the signs are all there? He is supposed to recognize the patterns. He is the one who calls things that are always true by their names, he understands the difference between constants and variables, he assigns logic to exceptions and rules. Wait for him to look at her as if he has no idea who she is, or who he is, or what they are.
Wait for it—”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It felt unfair, unjust, that the things that had so easily been shared between them—I’m strange, no I’m strange, okay we’re both strange, nobody understands us except for us—were now hers to bear alone.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He rubbed at his temple like she was a headache, a formula that wouldn’t obey, and it stung her. She, like his thoughts, had drained him, and the pain of knowing it festered in her chest.”
― 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

“Math is a difficult thing to love,” he said. “It’s precise and unforgiving, it’s evasive and it will never love me back, but I don’t have much of a choice, do I? It’s the thing that I can do that other people can’t, or that other people lack the patience for. Are there worthier things, more rewarding things? Yes, probably. But I don’t know what they are, they never showed themselves to me. Only math did .”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“What you’re seeing before you is a single intake of breath—one moment. It is the beauty of the world in its most objective state, because the artist isn’t expressing any meaning. He isn’t trying to define you or teach you or tell you what space to occupy”
― 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