Clever Girl Quotes

“What happens to our ecosystems happens to us because, as much as we might like to forget it, we are also animals.”
― Hannah McGregor, Clever Girl: Jurassic Park

“I had already gathered some of the intellectual and artistic tools that would help me navigate her death: black lipstick, the art of people who had just lived through the First World War, and a deeper sense of the Earth’s history as a series of apocalypses big and small, from extinction events to continents smashing into each other and creating mountain ranges. Each of these apocalypses had been both terrifying and world-making. I couldn’t imagine living after my mother died, but people did, it turned out; they lived through all kinds of things, things that changed them forever. This was the beauty and the horror at the heart of chaos. The ordered world I’d been promised if I was good enough turned out to be a lie. That realization was horrifying, but it also set me free in a way; if being a good girl couldn’t protect me from chaos, then maybe being good wasn’t the point.”
― Hannah McGregor, Clever Girl: Jurassic Park

“As any true dinosaur nerd will tell you, Jurassic Park’s clever girls are not even velociraptors; they’re actually deinonychus (from the Greek for “terrible claw”) and were deliberately misnamed by Michael Crichton, the original novel’s author, because “velociraptor” is more fun to say and most Americans don’t have a working knowledge of Greek.”
― Hannah McGregor, Clever Girl: Jurassic Park

“As John Hammond welcomes his visitors to Jurassic Park, he welcomes us as well: when Drs. Grant and Sattler — the scientists whose approval he needs — first look at the dinosaurs, we look, too, and alongside them we are swept up in the sheer joy of looking. John Williams’s majestic score washes over us, underlining that what we are seeing is larger than life, that it is sublime. But we are also swept into these parallel histories of circuses displaying non-normative bodies for entertainment and films displaying female bodies for the male gaze.”
― Hannah McGregor, Clever Girl: Jurassic Park