Best 24 quotes of Chloe Benjamin on MyQuotes

And what if I change?" "Then you'd be special. 'Cause most people don't.

As a species, God might be the greatest gift we've ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.

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.

During the breaking of the glass, he imagined his life until now shattering, too: its ignorance and anguish, its great and petty losses.

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.

I don't care about relevance. I care about family. There are things you do for the people who did them for you.

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.

In Simon’s voice, he heard the siren song of family – how it pulls you despite all sense; how it forces you to discard your convictions, your righteous selfhood, in favor of profound dependence.

Is there such a thing as too much pleasure? When Simon imagines the bathhouses, he thinks of a carnival of gluttony, an underworld so endless it seems possible to stay there forever. What he’s said to Robert isn’t a lie – he is afraid he wouldn’t be able to take it – but he’s also afraid he would, that his greed would have no edges and no end.

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.

I think magic holds the world together.

Magicians have never been very good at dying.

...on the topics of death and immortality, Judaism has little to say. While other religions are concerned with dying, Jews are most concerned with living. The Torah focuses on olam ha-ze: "this world.

People think they’re just beauty marks, but beauty can kill you.

Perhaps home, like the moon, will follow wherever she goes.

She feared that fate was fixed, but she hoped--God, she hoped--that it was not too late for life to surprise her. She hoped it was not too late for her to surprise herself.

She had never heard of a female magician. (‘Why are there so few of us?’ she asked Ilya once. ‘For one thing,’ he said, ‘the Inquisition. For two more, the Reformation and the Salem Witch Trials. What’s more, the clothing. You ever try to hide a dove in an evening gown?’)

She knows that stories have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present.

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.

She's always thought of home as a physical destination but perhaps... home, like the moon will follow wherever she goes.

Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true.

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.

Varya has had enough therapy to know that she's telling herself stories. She knows her faith--that rituals have power, that thoughts can change outcomes or ward off misfortune--is a magic trick: fiction, perhaps, but necessary for survival. And yet, and yet: Is it a story if you believe it?

Varya takes the handkerchief and wipes her face, and when she emerges she thinks of what Luke said--'that I'll kill them accidentally'--and laughs until he joins in and she begins to cry again, because she understands exactly what he means.