26 Quotes from Yesteryear book by Caro Claire Burke

Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 26 quotes from Yesteryear book by Caro Claire Burke that I underlined while reading the book. I hope you will like these quotes too.

By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.

Quotes on Childbirth

No one said childbirth was easy, honey. They just said it would be worth it.
No one, certainly no one, had mentioned how ugly childbirth could be, how gruesome and messy. If I was three ounces stupider, I might have expected the stork to drop a baby off at my doorstep, baked to perfection. Of course I'd known, in some rough practical sense, that my body would have to split open for a child to leave it, but I hadn't been remotely prepared for the bald terror of it; hadn't known that my softest and most private patch of skin would rip a full inch; hadn't known the delivery room would smell like iron from all the blood loss, not to mention literal human excrement. I felt like one of those teenage boys shipped off to Normandy for D-Day.

Quotes on Social Media

The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.
This, right here, is the strangest part about becoming famous online: you can have millions of followers and still not have a single in-person interaction with a fan for months.

More Quotes

The only thing more valuable than a person with God-given traits is a person who's willing to learn, and my husband, that man, had been willing to learn.
Who was I? A flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation's deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to. Like a nun in a porno, it didn't make sense, but also, by God: it worked. My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
Thank you for watching over the farm animals, Lord, and thank you for helping us pass five million on Instagram this week. We're only a few souls away from one million on YouTube, Lord. It's through Your will, and Your will alone, that I have reached so many hearts and minds. It's in Your name that I work to spread Your truth.
That's the thing about being a mother and a wife and an influencer, all at the same time: it's basically like breastfeeding three babies simultaneously. Like seducing three lovers at once.
It was a particularly special gift from our Creator that we had been blessed with three girls in a row. All children were gifts from God, of course, but groups of girls, little jewelry sets of two and three? That was something else altogether. A girl was lovely, a boy was nice, but girls, plural, were rainbows and fluff, personified. Radiant balls of delight. Such community-oriented creatures; with the addition of each new little lady to their little-lady tribe, they all seemed to grow a little taller, glow a little brighter. They carried each other like dolls. They braided each other's hair. They picked and preened and poked at one another with motherly obsession. The boys would keep us fed when we were old and feeble, I liked to say, but the girls? They would dance around our wheelchairs, toss rose petals over our graves. Plus, I'll admit it: they were easier to train. The boys occasionally resisted or got frustrated or bored, but not the girls. They could perform on film for hours without complaint, just like their mama.
It was an overwhelming task, protecting your child from the world.
America didn't care one iota about morality when it came to politicians. If anything, we expected them to be a little sleazy.
Throughout my life, on so many different occasions, I've wondered with genuine curiosity how people were able to move through the world without faith. In college, I watched the girls in my hall so proudly emancipate themselves from every institution that shaped them: their families, their country, their Creator. They were insistent on snipping every last one of their tethers to the mortal universe. It was unfathomable to me: the idea of floating forward through the world, held up by absolutely nothing. What kept you from plummeting?
I thought I wanted the world, Mama. But I've seen the world now, and I want no part in it.
My sister and I didn't talk like this. We never had. Our relationship had always felt a bit like the relationship between a queen and a pawn on the chessboard: we danced around each other, sometimes as allies, sometimes as rivals, but never once, in any sense, as equals.
In the world that I came from, divorce was a German word that translated loosely to a lifetime of destitution and misery followed by an eternity in Hell. You didn't leave your husband if he slapped you in the face, or had an affair, or set you up on a weekly allowance so sparse that you snapped at your children when they spilled a glass of milk, and you certainly didn't leave your husband if he was just some dumb rich guy.
The trick to baking a good loaf of bread is to build tension. You have to fold and press the dough in on itself, just enough to lock air within the layers of flour. Too much kneading, and it becomes a rock. Not enough kneading, and it comes out mealy.
There comes a point in every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak. This is inevitable. It cannot be avoided. The only real question in the matter is what type of freak your husband will be - meaning: if you are lucky, you will find out your husband is preternaturally into vintage children's train sets, and you will not find out that your husband pays high school cheerleaders for sex. That is the best we homemakers can hope for in this life: a man whose freakishness is not unspeakably violent or technically illegal, and therefore is something we are able to bear.
Sometimes you have to pretend to like something at first, and if you pretend for long enough, you might just end up liking it.
Want to blow through five million dollars so quickly it makes your head spin? Buy a fucking farm.
That's what children and poverty do: suck the collagen right out of you.
A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done, never done, never done.
People lie for all kinds of reasons. They lie to hurt people and to help people and sometimes because they can't bear the truth.
What every man needs to do his job is a wife who can do her job.
People aren't so different from pigs, apparently. Once they learn a rotten thing can be eaten, they will eat it, and then they will become addicted to it. They will let it drive them mad.
Children are amazingly flexible creatures. They can move through the centuries, adjust to new living conditions, transport themselves into new realities with surprising ease.
You cannot change people who refuse to be changed. You can only love them.