Top 100 Chloe Benjamin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.”

— Chloe Benjamin

2. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

3. “He saw that a thought could move molecules in the body, that the body races to actualize the reality of the brain.”

— Chloe Benjamin

4. “Thoughts have wings.”

— Chloe Benjamin

5. “If consciousness survives the death of the body, then everything she’s been told about death isn’t true. And if everything she’s been told about death isn’t true, maybe death is not death at all.”

— Chloe Benjamin

6. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

7. “The cost of loneliness is high, she knows, but the cost of loss is higher.”

— Chloe Benjamin

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

— Chloe Benjamin

9. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

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

— Chloe Benjamin

11. “So, this is how it started: as a secret, a challenge, a fire escape they used to dodge the hulking mass of their mother, who demanded that they hang laundry or get the goddamn cat out of the stovepipe whenever she found them lounging in the bunk room.”

— Chloe Benjamin

12. “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, and the next few years are his last? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.”

— Chloe Benjamin

13. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

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

— Chloe Benjamin

15. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

16. “So you’ve been through tragedy. No one’s denying it. But that is not the life you’re living now. The aura is stale. The story, Daniel, is stale. You can’t let go of it, because if you did, you wouldn’t be a victim anymore. But there are millions of people still living in oppression. I come from them. And those people can’t live in the past. They can’t live in their heads. They don’t have the luxury.”

— Chloe Benjamin

17. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

18. “But Varya disagreed. She knew that stories did have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. She had been an agnostic since graduate school, but if there was one tenant of Judaism with which she agreed, it was this: the power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations.”

— Chloe Benjamin

19. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

20. “Maybe this quietude – these small, daily pleasures – could be enough.”

— Chloe Benjamin

21. “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?”

— Chloe Benjamin

22. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

23. “She’d tell herself that what she really wanted was not to live forever, but to stop worrying.”

— Chloe Benjamin

24. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

25. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

26. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

27. “The periodical cicada hibernates underground in broods, feeding on fluids from tree roots. It would be easy to think them dead; perhaps, in some way – sedentary and silent, nestled two feet below the soil – they are. One night, seventeen years later, they break through the surface in astounding numbers. They climb the nearest vertical object; the husks of their nymphal skins drop crisply to the ground. Their bodies are pale and not yet hardened. In the darkness, they sing.”

— Chloe Benjamin

28. “Life isn’t just about defying death,” Raj says, his voice coming through the speakers on either side of the television. “It’s also about defying yourself, about insisting on transformation. As long as you can transform, my friends, you cannot die. What does Clark Kent have in common with the chameleon? Right when they’re on the brink of destruction, they change. Where have they gone? Nowhere we can see. The chameleon has become a branch. Clark Kent has become Superman.”

— Chloe Benjamin

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

— Chloe Benjamin

30. “But what I’ve realized – what I think he already knew – is that we believed in the same thing. You could call it a trapdoor, a hidden compartment, or you could call it God: a placeholder for what we don’t know. A space where the impossible becomes possible.”

— Chloe Benjamin

31. “Klara won’t be a woman who is sawed in half or tied in chains – nor will she be rescued or liberated. She’ll save herself. She’ll be the saw.”

— Chloe Benjamin

32. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

33. “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?”

— Chloe Benjamin

34. “The point is that you have to live a lesser life in order to live a longer one. Don’t you see that? The point is that you’re willing to make that bargain, you have made that bargain, but to what end?”

— Chloe Benjamin

35. “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

36. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

37. “He feels only loss, not of the father he knew but of the person that Saul might have been.”

— Chloe Benjamin

38. “If human beings vanished, and so did our consciousness of the world – our inventories of plants and insects and endangered birds, our ability to predict weather patterns and measure whole populations – would the planet still know itself? Or would it be better off without our predictions and the ways we made them come true?”

— Chloe Benjamin

39. “They began together: before any of them were people, they were eggs, four out of their mother’s millions. Astonishing, that they could diverge so dramatically in their temperaments, their fatal flaws-like strangers caught for seconds in the same elevator.”

— Chloe Benjamin

40. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

41. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

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

— Chloe Benjamin

43. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

44. “From control,” he says, “comes freedom. From restraint comes flexibility. From the trunk” – he puts one hand to his core, then gestures, with his free hand, to his raised leg – “come the branches.”

— Chloe Benjamin

45. “Even Eden – especially Eden – didn’t last forever.”

— Chloe Benjamin

46. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

47. “Just because I don’t talk about it doesn’t mean I keep it quiet.”

— Chloe Benjamin

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

— Chloe Benjamin

49. “Compassion is the purview of civilians, not those whose job it was to act. Action requires you to chose on thing over another. And it’s better to help one side than neither.”

— Chloe Benjamin

50. “The sun is nestled just above the Catskills, the mountains a mellow wash of periwinkle and peach.”

— Chloe Benjamin