Quotes from Reconstructing Amelia

“Sometimes its hard to tell how fast the current's moving until you're headed over a waterfall”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been counting the minutes until I could forgive her. But it's a lot harder to forgive someone who's not looking to apologize.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Everyone has beacons. Lights that guide them home.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“...[T]here's a fine line between wild and full-on whack job.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“But some things you can't outrun, no matter how fast you move your legs.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“But it’s a lot harder to forgive someone who’s not looking to apologize.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil,”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Because there are 176 definitions for the word loser on urbandictionary.com.

Don't Be a Statistic.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Clothes were to Sylvia what books were to me: the only thing that really mattered.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“...[E]ven I know that being a parent is awful ninety-five percent of the time...As far as I can tell, it's that last five percent that keeps the human race from dying out. Four parts blinding terror, one part perfection. It's like mainlining heroin. One taste of life on that edge and you're hooked.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“But the tour did remind me that my life had been bigger than just that one moment. One girl. One set of words on paper. That I had gone through other things before-good and terrible, funny and awful-and I had survived.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“It was too late to change anything. Too late to make different choices. To be a better mother than she had been. Kate could only be the mother that she was, Amelia’s mother—the curator of her memory, the keeper of her secrets, the cherisher of her heart. That, she would always be.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“One of the things that was great about my mom, as a mom, was that she always knew when she was being kind of ridiculous.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“She had a wildness tucked inside her that made her seem fun and unpredictable and just a little tiny bit dangerous. Of course, it was also the exact same thing that eventually ended up driving the boys away. After all, there’s a fine line between wild and full-on whack job.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell how fast the current’s moving until you’re headed over a waterfall.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“we're teenagers," Sylvia said. "we're all depressed.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Simple, Kate wanted to say. I'm already dead.
Instead, she'd pressed her lips together so hard it made her eyes water as she'd grabbed her prescriptions. The ones her therapist had assured her would help with the nausea and the insomnia. In reality, they'd nothing except make her feel as if she were underwater. Kate kept taking them in the hope she might eventually drown.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“She had a wildness tucked inside her that made her seem fun and unpredictable and just a little tiny bit dangerous.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Articles about things weren't the same thing as stories I'd made up. Those I wasn't ready for the world to pick apart, not yet.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“sure I can handle waiting for more bad news.” “I know, Kate, and I’m sorry.” His voice”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Simple" Kate had wanted to say, "I'm already dead.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Good luck is not the same thing as wise counsel.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“No one wanted to talk to a mother whose only child had just killed herself.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Staying home ended up being easier said than done. Kate had spent the first days after Amelia’s death surrounded by her three closest friends from college. They’d swooped in and propped her upright, had seen to it that she ate and bathed and breathed.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Well, if it’s for a paper, then my honest answer is that I think sororities are bad. I think they’re terrible, actually. I think they make girls feel awful about themselves under the guise of sisterhood.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“But some things you can’t outrun, no matter how fast you move your legs.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“After all, there’s a fine line between wild and full-on whack job.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

“Certainly she could never have exchanged pleasantries with anyone. What would there be for them to say anyway? Sorry? Sorry your daughter is dead, Sorry your daughter jumped off the roof of her school when you were on your way to pick her up. Sorry you were late. Too bad you'll be reliving that failure for the rest of your miserable life.”
― Kimberly McCreight, quote from Reconstructing Amelia

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“I looked around for that welcoming light I'd heard about, but I didn't see it. Instead, everything around me seemed to glow and shimmer in the sunlight. I heard beautiful sounds-not the voices of dead loved ones, but the laughter and singing of my children when they were tiny. I saw James, young and shirtless, chasing them through Mama's garden. Off in the distance I saw Barbara Jean and Clarice, and even myself when we were kids, dancing to music pouring out of my old pink and violet portable record player. Here I was with my fingers brushing up against the frame of the picture I'd been painting for the last fifty-five years, and my beautiful, scarred husband, my happy children, and my laughing friends were right there with me.”
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“Shouldn’t children be taught critical, sceptical thinking from an early age? Shouldn’t we all be taught to doubt, to weigh up plausibility, to demand evidence?”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me," White Logic whispers as I ride along. "What of it? I am truth. You know it. You cannot combat me. They say I make for death. What of it? It is truth. Life lies in order to live. Life is a perpetual lie-telling process. Life is a mad dance in the domain of flux, wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow, chained to the wheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are ghosts. Life is ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse, permeate each the other and all the others, that are, that are not, that always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future. Life is apparitional, and passes. You are an apparition. Through all the apparitions that preceded you and that compose the parts of you, you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire, and gibbering you will pass on, interfusing, permeating the procession of apparitions that will succeed you." And of course it is all unanswerable, and as I ride along through the evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comte called the world. And I remember what another pessimist of sentiency has uttered: "Transient are all. They, being born, must die, and, being dead, are glad to be at rest.”
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“Victoria hated messes. She hated distractions. Friends were the worst distraction of all.”
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“The hostage hours had blurred into one another, anonymous as a line of smashed pumpkins.”
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