Chloe Benjamin Quotes

His point," Varya said, "was that it's impossible to survive without dehumanizing the enemy, without creating an enemy in the first place. He said that compassion was the purview of civilians, not those whose job was to act.

We got one life, right?'
'Far as we know.

The laws of human beings were counterintuitive and absurd, broken as often as they were followed.

Klara has always known she's meant to be a bridge: between reality and illusion, the present and the past, this world and the next. She just has to figure out how.

If they had not lived as though life were a mad dash toward some unearned climax; if they had walked instead of fucking run

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

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

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.

When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.

He's classy,' said Klara, the first time she met him, and Simon beamed with pride. But this is also part of the problem: Simon likes raunch, likes being spanked and ogled and sucked off, and he has some appetite for depravity – or at least, what his parents would have called depravity – that he is finally beginning to acknowledge.

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.

His death did not point to the failure of the body. It pointed to the power of the human mind, an entirely different adversary-to the fact that thoughts have wings

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.

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

Caught in the moorless place between young adulthood and middle age, we were just learning how to forgive ourselves.

He believes in bad choices; he believes in bad luck. And yet the memory of the woman on Hester Street is like a miniscule needle in his stomach, something he swallowed long ago and which floats, undetectable, except for moments when he moves a certain way and feels a prick.

In 1949, Saul was thirteen. Never before had he seen his father cry. Suddenly, he realized that what he took to be his home - a two-bedroom apartment in a newly renovated brick building above Gertel's bakery - was to his father no more than a prop on someone else's stage, which could at any moment be struck and carried into the wings. In its absence, home was in the rhythm of the halakhah: the daily prayer, the weekly Sabbath, the annual holy days. In time was their culture. In time, not in space, was their home.

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.

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.

He imagined a new God, one who nudged him when he was going the wrong way but never strong-armed him, one who advised but did not insist – one who guided him, like a father. A Father.

In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: What if the woman on Hester Street is right? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.

There were times he thought of his siblings and felt love sing from him like a shofar, rich with joy and agony and eternal recognition: those three made from the same star stuff as he, those he'd known from the beginning of the beginning. But when he was with them, the smallest infraction made him irreversibly resentful.

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.

...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.

Magic is only one tool among many for keeping one another alive.

Will I ever find someone I love as much as you?'
'Please. You'll find someone you love much more.' (pg.34)