Thea

“One day Betelgeuse would explode in a tremendous spark of light, leaving behind a planetary nebula. And as all that dust and gas cleared, all that would remain of it would be a tiny white dwarf star. A core, without fire. “Nothing lasts forever,” her father said. She and her father had seen plenty of white stars through the telescope. She wondered which ones from her childhood were gone now, and whether they were actually dead, or if they were just too faint to emit light. Did you have to be missed to exist?”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“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, The Immortalists

“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, The Immortalists

“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 tenet 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, The Immortalists