Alone With You in the Ether

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it is violent? Can you love it even when it does not love me?

She is in all of his spaces and all of his thoughts. He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn into her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.

I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed

You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.

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.

When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but 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.

Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.

I want you to say everything, anything. I want to have your thoughts, I want to bottle them, I want to put them in my drawer for safekeeping.

I like it,” he said. “What?” He loosened the wine from his lips. “Your brain.

So when people say we¡re alone in the ether?" "Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.

it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.

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 tomd 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 pitylessly. So carelessly.

I am more addicted to the thought of your name on my tongue than I am to any other form of vice.

For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.

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.

Instead she thinks: I love him, and for a moment it doesn't matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.

he doesn't want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with.

The world loved to take a beautiful woman and exclaim at the charm of her single imperfection

You wouldn't make love with him, you'd make art.

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.

So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.

Deities themselves had changed over time, but the act of devotion had not.

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.

So when people say were alone in the ether?" "Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.

He kisses her, thinks, Go on, ruin me. Wreck me, please. She kisses him back and she does.

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.

Empires have fallen like this, he thinks, but it only makes him want her more, makes him look at his hands and think, My god, what a waste of time doing anything else but holding her. What a waste, and then he says aloud, JesusfuckingChrist what have you done to me? And she says, Kiss me.

It frustrated him immensely that he would never be able to prove that time didn't stop when she met his eye.

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.

It was at moments like this, high enough to inhale the promise of risk, that the whittled lines of city streets brought out his lingering melancholy; that l'appel du vide, the call of the void.