Top 100 Chloe Benjamin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The sun is nestled just above the Catskills, the mountains a mellow wash of periwinkle and peach.”

— Chloe Benjamin

52. “Gali is still turning. “From control,” he says, “comes freedom. From restraint comes flexibility.”

— Chloe Benjamin

53. “Will I ever find someone I love as much as you?” he asks. “Please.” Klara laughs. “You’ll find someone you love much more.”

— Chloe Benjamin

54. “Goodbye, my love.” Klara puts her nose to Ruby’s forehead and inhales the milky sweetness, the sour sweat – the essential humanness – of her skin. She drinks it in. “I’ll see you soon.”

— Chloe Benjamin

55. “It was like watching the power incrementally turning off throughout a neighborhood: certain parts of her went dark, then others.”

— Chloe Benjamin

56. “It sounds like you’re saying we can choose to live. Or we can choose to survive.”

— Chloe Benjamin

57. “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. Acting requires you to choose one thing over another. And it’s better to help one side than neither.”

— Chloe Benjamin

58. “His belief went willingly, logically, the way the boogeyman disappeared once you looked under the bed. That was the problem with God: he didn’t hold up to a critical analysis.”

— Chloe Benjamin

59. “He’s losing her already, she’s leaving for that foreign, teenage girl place: mountains of resentment, potholes he can’t see.”

— Chloe Benjamin

60. “Here’s what happens: you make choices, and then they make choices. Your choices make choices.”

— Chloe Benjamin

61. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

62. “But Robert’s speech has stricken him silent, in anger and in shame – why is it that those feelings are so inextricable?”

— Chloe Benjamin

63. “What is the natural environment of the rhesus monkey? Human beings are the only primate more broadly distributed across the globe than the rhesus macaque, these nomads who have traveled across land and over water, who can live as well on a four-thousand-foot mountain as in a tropical forest or a mangrove swamp.”

— Chloe Benjamin

64. “I don’t care about relevance. I care about family. There are things you do for the people who did them for you.”

— Chloe Benjamin

65. “His mother has relinquished him, given him to the world of which he longed to be part. And yet he feels a spike of fear: the filter has been taken off the lens, the safety net ripped from beneath his feet, and he is dizzy with dreadful independence.”

— Chloe Benjamin

66. “During the breaking of the glass, he imagined his life until now shattering, too: its ignorance and anguish, its great and petty losses. From the pieces, he would assemble something new with Mira.”

— Chloe Benjamin

67. “What’s the one thing that’ll be around as long as human beings? Our desire to know.”

— Chloe Benjamin

68. “Nobody picks their life. I sure didn’t.” Gertie laughs, a scrape. “Here’s what happens: you make choices, and then they make choices. Your choices make choices.”

— Chloe Benjamin

69. “That was the problem with God: he didn’t hold up to a critical analysis. He wouldn’t stand for it. He disappeared.”

— Chloe Benjamin

70. “Other guys haven’t talked to Simon like this. Actually, with other guys, Simon hasn’t talked much at all, and certainly not about his family. But this is how it is with most of the men in the Castro – men suspended in time as if in amber.”

— Chloe Benjamin

71. “Manhattan should be an oasis, but he’s afraid to reinvent himself in a place that has always been home.”

— Chloe Benjamin

72. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

73. “It’s ’cause you can’t take it. You don’t have space in your head for anyone’s problems but yours.”

— Chloe Benjamin

74. “She’d lost both him and herself, the person she was in relation to him.”

— Chloe Benjamin

75. “Years later, a different therapist asked her exactly what she was afraid of. Varya was initially stumped, not because she didn’t know what she was afraid of but because it was harder to think of what she wasn’t.”

— Chloe Benjamin

76. “The city is changing, and she missed the very best parts... the hippies are just homeless.”

— Chloe Benjamin

77. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

78. “I love you, darling, he said, I might be home late. He fell with the towers at ten in the morning.”

— Chloe Benjamin

79. “On some days, she doesn’t think it’s absurd to believe that a thought can make something come true.”

— Chloe Benjamin

80. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

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

— Chloe Benjamin

82. “And what if I change?” It seems impossible that Varya’s future is already inside her like an actress just offstage, waiting decades to leave the wings. “Then you’d be special. ‘Cause most people don’t.”

— Chloe Benjamin

83. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

84. “The power of words. They weaseled under door crevices and through keyholes. They hooked into invididuals and wormed through generations.”

— Chloe Benjamin

85. “It’s not enough to explain what we don’t understand. It’s not enough to account for the inconsistencies we see and hear and feel. It’s not enough on which to pin our hopes, our dreams – our faith. 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. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate reality is.”

— Chloe Benjamin

86. “I was afraid,” she says. “Of all the things that can go wrong when people are attached to each other.”

— Chloe Benjamin

87. “New to her are three more inches of height and the dark patch of fur between her legs. Her breasts are palm sized, her nipples pink dimes.”

— Chloe Benjamin

88. “But right now, I almost feel like I understand her, because suicide doesn’t seem irrational. What’s irrational is continuing on, day after day, as if forward momentum is natural.”

— Chloe Benjamin

89. “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. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate” – she puts the cup down – “reality” – she makes a fist – “is.”

— Chloe Benjamin

90. “Magicians have never been very good at dying.”

— Chloe Benjamin

91. “Klara could not explain to anyone what it meant for her to lose Simon. She’d lost both him and herself, the person she was in relation to him. She had lost time, too, whole chunks of life that only Simon had witnessed:.”

— Chloe Benjamin

92. “I know they’re your family,” he says, veering onto the road. “But if they weren’t, you wouldn’t like them, either.”

— Chloe Benjamin

93. “What is growing a baby if not making a flower appear from thin air, turning one scarf into two?”

— Chloe Benjamin

94. “Klara knows what happens when you’re careless, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t.”

— Chloe Benjamin

95. “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.”

— Chloe Benjamin

96. “As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.”

— Chloe Benjamin

97. “The impossibility of moving beyond loss, faced against the likelihood you will: it’s as absurd, as seemingly miraculous, as survival always is.”

— Chloe Benjamin

98. “I think magic holds the world together.”

— Chloe Benjamin

99. “The Mirage’s entertainment director asks Klara if she’ll let Raj saw her in half – “Easy-peasy; won’t hurt a bit” – but she refuses. He thinks she’s afraid of the trick when the truth is that she could give him an hour-long tutorial on P. T. Selbit and his misogynistic inventions: Destroying a Girl, Stretching a Lady, Crushing a Woman, all of them perfectly timed to capitalize on postwar bloodthirst and women’s suffrage.”

— Chloe Benjamin

100. “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? Her deeper secret, the reason she doesn’t think she’ll ever be rid of the disorder, is that on some days she doesn’t think it’s a disorder. On some days, she doesn’t think it’s absurd to believe that a thought can make something come true.”

— Chloe Benjamin