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A review by axi_on
Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake
5.0
this book is everything. the prose is so poetic, the subtle intimacy is ridiculous, the fervent desire to have your muse be your art, and the characters *need* to yearn for each other is just... wow
this was like if pride & prejudice (2005) and hozier had a baby. there is such a fixation on hands and breaths and long poetic musings about the lengths regan & aldo would go for each other. like these are only *some* the parts I annotated:
"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.”
‘Yes,’ he said—he would have said it to anything, she could have suggested a mutiny and he’d have searched tirelessly for an axe, a pitchfork, Excalibur itself.”
"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."
"He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her."
"If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces."
“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 fully focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same and 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, it’s 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.”
are you kidding me???
every minute of this was so intoxicating and I am so so in love with this
this was like if pride & prejudice (2005) and hozier had a baby. there is such a fixation on hands and breaths
Spoiler
(the church scene oh my godd)Spoiler
"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.”
‘Yes,’ he said—he would have said it to anything, she could have suggested a mutiny and he’d have searched tirelessly for an axe, a pitchfork, Excalibur itself.”
"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."
"He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her."
"If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces."
“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 fully focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same and 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, it’s 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.”
are you kidding me???
every minute of this was so intoxicating and I am so so in love with this