Quotes from Reconstructing Amelia

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


About the author

Kimberly McCreight
Born place: in The United States
Born date September 20, 2018
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Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ ¤ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546]. Space Colonization Subgroup. Open discussion board.

Okay, so imagine we get past the next few rough decades and finally do what we should have back in TwenCen. Say we mine asteroids for platinum, discover the secrets of true nanotechnology, and set Von Neumann "sheep" grazing on the moon to produce boundless wealth. To listen to some of the rest of you, all our problems would then be over. The next step, star travel, and colonization of the galaxy, would be trivial.

But hold on! Even assuming we solve how to maintain long-lasting ecologies in space and get so wealthy the costs of star-flight aren't crippling, you've still got the problem of time.

I mean, most hypothetical designs show likely starships creeping along at no more than ten percent of the speed of light, a whole lot slower than those sci-fi cruisers we see zipping on three-vee. At such speeds it may take five, ten generations to reach a good colony site. Meanwhile, passengers will have to maintain villages and farms and cranky, claustrophobic grandkids, all inside their hollowed-out, spinning worldlets.

What kind of social engineering will that take? Do you know how to design a closed society that'd last so long without flying apart? Oh, I think it can be done. But don't pretend it'll be simple!

Nor will be solving the dilemma of gene pool isolation. In the arks and zoos right now, a lot of rescued species are dying off even though the microecologies are right, simply because too few individuals were included in the original mix. For a healthy gene pool you need diversity, variety, heterozygosity.

One thing's clear, no starship will make it carrying only one racial group. What'll be needed, frankly, are mongrels… people who've bred back and forth with just about everybody and seem to enjoy it.”
― David Brin, quote from Earth


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