96 Quotes by Chloe Benjamin

What if I change?" she asked the fortune teller, all those years go, sure that knowledge could save her from bad luck and tragedy. "Most people don't," the woman said.

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

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.

What is growing a baby if not making a flower appear from thin air, turning one scarf into two? (pg.131)

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.

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.

Just because I don't talk about it doesn't mean I keep it quiet.

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.

She had never heard of a female magician. (‘Why are there so few of us?’ she asked Ilya once. ‘For one thing,’ he said, ‘the Inquisition. For two more, the Reformation and the Salem Witch Trials. What’s more, the clothing. You ever try to hide a dove in an evening gown?’)