Kimberly McCreight · 382 pages
Rating: (105.8K votes)
“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
“The pathway to hell was paved with good intentions, but what about the wrongs committed for the right reasons? Were they included as well? Life had taught him that anything that starts wrong, ends wrong. In this case, he supposed that only time and its unpredictable mercies would tell. - Percy”
― Leila Meacham, quote from Roses
“For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love one seeks not to know one’s grief but to offer to her who is causing it that expression of it which seems to one the most moving. One says the things which one feels the need of saying, and which the other will not understand, one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: 'I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult.' I said also: 'I shall probably not see you again;' I said it while I continued to avoid shewing a coldness which she might think affected, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen.”
― Marcel Proust, quote from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
“Omens are everywhere in this world you just have to find the one that fits.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from I Shall Wear Midnight
“I took the easy way, and to an extent I regret that. Still, though, the way we did it was honest. We played it and sang it the way we felt it, and there's a lot to be said for that.”
― Johnny Cash, quote from Cash
“During intermission she peeked out at the theater, watching it refill. When it was almost full and the lights blinked on and off, she saw three people file in through the center door and her breath caught. Time lapsed as they walked down the center aisle: three teenage girls all in a row.
They were so big, so bright, so beautiful, so magnificent to Carmen’s eyes that she thought she was imagining them. They were like goddesses, like Titans. She was so proud of them! They were benevolent and they were righteous. Now, these were friends.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
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