Home > Author > Chloe Benjamin
1 " By the time she was six, even her own parents were dead. God must have seemed less likely than chance, goodness less likely than evil--so Gertie knocked on wood and crossed fingers, tossed coins into fountains and rice over shoulders. When she prayed, she bargained. "
― Chloe Benjamin , The Immortalists
2 " She knows that stories have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. "
3 " Simon still feels high, remembering how it felt to dance with those beautiful, sculpted men, how it felt to be adored. For a moment, in the dressing room, he had friends. He wasn’t thinking about home, about his mother, or what his father would think of the crowd. "
4 " Vaginas have never appealed to him: their cabbage-like folds, their long, hidden corridor. He craves the long thrust of the cock, its heady insistence, and the challenge of a body like his. "
5 " He wants their sexuality to be an equalizer; he wants to focus on the discrimination they face in common. But Simon can conceal his sexuality. Robert can’t conceal his blackness, and almost everyone in the Castro is white. "
6 " But this is how it is with most of the men in the Castro – men suspended in time as if in amber, men who don’t want to look back. "
7 " When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. "
8 " If nothing else, Judaism had taught her to keep running, no matter who tried to hold her hostage. It had taught her to create her own opportunities, to turn rock into water and water to blood. It had taught her that such things were possible. "
9 " She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child. "
10 " Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. Why else would anyone play at permanence--fall in love, have children, buy a house--in the face of all evidence there's no such thing? "
11 " The cost of loneliness is high, she knows, but the cost of loss is higher. "
12 " I suppose I think we need God for the same reason we need art.” “Because it’s nice to look at?” “No.” Mira smiled. “Because it shows us what’s possible. "
13 " Magic is only one tool among many for keeping one another alive. "
14 " In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity. "
15 " When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone's ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility. The point is not to negate reality, but to peel back its scrim, revealing reality's peculiarities and contradictions. The very best magic tricks, the kind Klara wants to perform, do not subtract from reality. They add. "
16 " Character is fate—that’s what he said. They’re bound up, those two, like brothers and sisters. You wanna know the future?” She points at Varya with her free hand. “Look in the mirror. "
17 " She'll tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying.'What if I change?' she asked the fortune teller, all those years ago, sure that knowledge could save her from bad luck and tragedy. 'Most people don't,' the woman said. "
18 " Perhaps home, like the moon, will follow wherever she goes. "
19 " She’d tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying. "
20 " Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. Why else would anyone play at permanence - fall in love, have children, buy a house - in the face of all evidence there's no such thing? The trick is not to convert them. The trick is to get them to admit it. "
