Alone With You in the Ether Quotes

“He wasn’t like anyone she’d known before, not like anyone who expected her to be a certain way. Not like all the people she’d been shielding him from, not for his sake but for hers, afraid he’d come to understand what she really was, what she’d been for years, what she’d always been. Afraid, always afraid, that this was still some splintered version of pretend, that she was only crafting a new version for him when she wanted to believe she was really herself. Afraid that now she was Aldo’s Regan, which meant that Aldo’s Regan could fade into obscurity; that her honesty with him was just another version of a lie.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She did that, loved him invasively, exploring him like the depths of the sea.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Time.
Once upon a time.
Time to begin.
Time and time again.
Time after time.
Time is a function of lies, a trick of the light, a mistranslation.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He loved her fiercely for that.
He didn’t see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows, until he realized that he could no longer recall a life without her. It was as if the older versions of him had been erased and could no longer exist. He realized that his relationship with time, whatever it was before, was now forever altered.”
― 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

“It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn’t stop when she met his eye.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She leaned forward. 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. Their hands, meanwhile, stayed back like tired captives, wary prisoners of war.”
― 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

“She couldn’t prevent the urge to know his thoughts. She wanted to lace them between her fingers, to root them in her hands, to twine them around her limbs until he’d secured her within the invisible web of his carefully ordered madness.”
― 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

“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

“There are no perfect circles, Regan.
Yes, there’s one, and it’s this one: They fall in love because they’re always in love.
That’s circular, not a circle.
He can believe whatever he wants; she knows it’s a perfect circle.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Yes, it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Because when they embark, they will have each turned a corner.
And everything will be as it was, only very slightly different.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Somewhere in the universe a star exploded or someone was born or they died or time passed while Regan stood there and missed him, while she mourned him, and then she thought with an equally quiet violence: Maybe I do not have to do it alone.
By minute fifteen he was finally gone, turning abruptly and half-sprinting for the doors, and in his absence Regan emptied, watching all their alternate lives begin to wilt. She mourned them like her children, holding their lifeless corpses to her chest, and then she forgot them, slowly, each one vanishing without a trace, until she held nothing at all.
Eventually she looked down at her empty hands and thought: Damn it.
Damn it, I love him.
Then, after the smoke cleared, she could see nothing else.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Alone with you, she would gasp when she came, do you understand why I called it that, what it means? Because you and I, we are so different, aren’t we, and yet we are more like each other than the rest of the world is like us, and for that I bless you, I condemn you, I sanctify you, I sustain you. This painting, Aldo, it’s about God. They cannot hang it in the Louvre, they will have to put it in the Vatican, because what we are is holy, and this, you and me as one together, is transubstantiation of the highest degree. This is you and me becoming the consecration of us; amen, above everything, I believe.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“This is what it looks like to love you; it looks like an abyss, but it isn’t, do you understand? All falls come with danger, Aldo, but not us. Not us, we float.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“It’s you and me alone in the ether and you don’t even know it, you don’t even care, but still you are tied to this, and to me, and so be it, really.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Alone with You in the Ether, it said, followed by Oils and acrylics.
Below, in smaller letters: C. Regan.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“An ending is only an ending, she thought, when both parties agree they’ve reached the end.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“The thought dazed Regan, arresting her in a state of half-awake, half-asleep. If she reclaimed all her things—snuck in like the thief that she was and stole back the life that she’d shared with him—would Aldo wake to feel relief? Would he recognize it as a favor? On the one hand, 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? Did she want him to forget (did she want to forget?) or was his pain something that she had earned, that she deserved, purely by virtue of existing? Was it fairer for him to come home to an emptiness he could trace like the scars along his shoulders? Should the echoes of her still linger for him beyond the pain?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Nobody wants you, nobody has ever wanted you, you’re irresponsible with the love of others and so they lose interest in you, they always will.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“She used them, her lies, sparingly these days. She found they were like old coping mechanisms, like the old pair of crutches she’d had when she was eight; something she’d kept around, just in case, until her mother had cleaned the basement and decided to throw them away.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Too many people had refused when she had wished that they would beg her to stay, and now, because of them, she had let him go so easily, unclenching all her fingers at once.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Life was, for Regan, a cycle of arriving and leaving, passing through a revolving door. When she left, which she always did, she left quietly; not even a gust of wind but a little breeze, hardly a disturbance at all.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“Aldo did not tell Masso that 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 to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“You really haven’t changed, have you?” he asks her.
Eventually, a later version of Aldo will recognize the detail for what it is. There it is, he thinks, and the thought is unsatisfactory, but final.
There it is. That’s the moment.
That’s the one.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He woke me up, she wanted to scream; he woke me, and for that I will always rely on him, I will be to him what he is to math, and can’t you see how fragile that is? Can’t you see how intangibly I exist, and how perilously? Can’t you see that I—the me that I am right now, sitting here with you at this moment—am a figment of his imagination? He dreamt me into being. He can always undream me, unbelieve me. He can unmask me, and then what will be left? Will I always fear him as much as I love him? Will I always be only one half of his whole? What are soulmates, and am I one, or am I simply just a parasite, a leech, a cancer that spreads and takes hold and takes pleasure in choking us both?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“What a fool he was, how short-sighted, how little-lived he’d been not to feel her fear as she felt it. For her it was an informed terror, re-entering a haunted house, replaying an old and frequent death. She kissed him; Sorry about your stupidity. She wanted to tell him, to teach him: Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“He would have to keep her, somehow, and that would mean solving her. That would mean making her his impossible problem. Time travel no longer held any interest for him, only Regan and whatever it would take to make her a fixture in his life. Knowing her would mean knowing everything, not just her thoughts or her truths or the way she liked to be fucked. Knowing her would mean knowing her future, having it for himself. It was knowing what her children would look like, and what she would look like someday, when the youth was gone from her face and replaced by something else; by what? A mystery. It was a fucking mystery and Aldo couldn’t sit idly by while there were mysteries afoot. Uncertainty was something he lived with, yes, but not anymore. Frustration and restraint, she had said, equating his love of math with his love of her.
I am Atlas, he thought, holding up the heavens. I will be endurance, I will have to endure.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether