Cassandra’s Reviews > Alone With You in the Ether > Status Update

“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.”

“He would have to keep her, somehow, and that would mean solving her. That would mean making her his impossible problem.”

Helppp I am tired and exhausted of these twooo

“It’s not that,” she said quietly. “I just … I like us like this, I like us how we are. I don’t want them in it, around it. Near it, even.”

“Besides, if we fuck it up, you can just go back in time and fix it, can’t you?”

“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.”

Reading this requires a ton of stamina...

“Not bees?”
“Not bees,” he said, and handed her the blunt. “Bees are for you.”

“You wouldn’t make love with him, you’d make art. Maybe that would be worth it, but still, art is tragedy. Art is loss. It’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. You’ve always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain.”

"Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?”


“Regan,” Marc said again, “if this guy is … I mean, if he’s just something you need to get out of your system—”


“She wished he’d flinched, but he hadn’t. She hadn’t really expected him to. Do enough drugs and nothing could faze you; choose a woman who gambled on her shock value and eventually you went numb just to cope.”

“Aldo,” she said.
“Regan,” he replied.
“I—” Don’t hold hands with anyone ever again.

These two and their church scene was so weird and clunky and awkward and I'm all for it

“The first time she’d used his name, she’d been pretending at unfamiliarity. That time, though, he could hear the way it had previously crossed her mind.”

This book is so intimate that at times I feel so shy reading it...