Chloe Benjamin > Quotes

“The power of words. They weaseled under door crevices and through keyholes. They hooked into invididuals and wormed through generations.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“It sounds like you're saying we can choose to live. Or we can choose to survive.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Perhaps home, like the moon, will follow wherever she goes.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“If they had not lived as though life were a mad dash toward some unearned climax; if they had walked instead of fucking run”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“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.
“So give me some examples,” said the therapist, and that night Varya made a list.
Cancer. Climate change. Being the victim of a car crash. Being the cause of a car crash. (There was a period when the thought of killing a bicyclist while making a right turn caused Vaya to follow any bicyclist for blocks, checking again and again to make sure she hadn’t.) Gunmen, Plane crashes – sudden doom! People wearing Band-Aids. AIDS ¬¬- really, all types of viruses and bacteria and disease. Infecting someone else. Dirty surfaces, soiled linens, bodily secretions. Drugstores and pharmacies. Ticks and bedbugs and lice. Chemicals. The homeless. Crowds. Uncertainty and risk and open-ended endings. Responsibility and guilt. She is even afraid of her own mind. She is afraid of its power, of what it does to her.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Perhaps home, like the moon will follow wherever she goes.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“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, The Immortalists

“She's always thought of home as a physical destination but perhaps... home, like the moon will follow wherever she goes.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“It was like watching the power incrementally turning off throughout a neighborhood: certain parts of her went dark, then others. Certain modes of bravery — emotional bravery — and desire. The cost of loneliness is high, she knows, but the cost of loss is higher.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Just because I don't talk about it doesn't mean I keep it quiet.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“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, The Immortalists

“Siempre había pensado en el hogar como un destino físico, pero quizás Raj y Ruby son hogar suficiente. Quizá el hogar, como la luna, la seguirá dondequiera que vaya.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Here's what happens: you make choices, and then they make choices. Your choices make choices.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“I think magic holds the world together.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“And what if I change?"
"Then you'd be special. 'Cause most people don't.”
― Chloe Benjamin

“Cancer. Climate change. Being the victim of a car crash. Being the cause of a car crash. (There was a period when the thought of killing a bicyclist while making a right turn caused Varya to follow any bicyclist for blocks, checking again and again to make sure she hadn't.) Gunmen. Plane crashes--- sudden doom! People wearing Band-Aids. AIDS----really, all types of viruses and bacteria and disease. Infecting someone else. Dirty surfaces, soiled linens, bodily secretions. Drugstores and pharmacies. Ticks and bedbugs and lice. Chemicals. The homeless. Crowds. Uncertainty and risk and open-ended endings. Responsibility and guilt. She is even afraid of her own mind. She is afraid of it's power, of what it does to her.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Я люблю тебя, я люблю тебя — пароль и отзыв, столь же необходимые для жизни, как пища, как воздух”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Когда она запустила руки в задние карманы его джинсов и притянула его к себе, его накрыло такое блаженство, что стало почти неловко. Он лишь сейчас осознал, как долго был одинок”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“How had she been able to do it? Because she thought of them: Simon and Saul, Klara and Daniel and Gertie. She thought of them in her second trimester, when she was often disabled by panic, and during her third, when she felt huge as a walrus and peed more than she slept. She thought of them with every push. She held them in her mind so that she could feel nothing else -- she loved them and loved them until they disarmed her, made her strong and broke her open, gave her powers she did not normally have.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Если вы слышите стук копыт, это, скорее всего, лошади, а не зебры”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“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, The Immortalists

“Разумеется, люди всю жизнь выбирают, во что им верить — в любовь, в идеологию, в счастливые билеты. Но Бог совсем не таков. Бога нельзя выбрать по своему вкусу, как пару перчаток”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“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, The Immortalists

“...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.”
― Chloe Benjamin

“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, The Immortalists

“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, Los inmortales

“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, The Immortalists

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

“I love you, darling, he said, I might be home late. He fell with the towers at ten in the morning.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Klara knows what happens when you're careless, but that doesn't mean she isn't.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists