96 Quotes by Chloe Benjamin

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.