Aima

“My eldest daughter was like me, not just in likeness but in disposition, too: she held her intelligence like a knife behind her back. Now that she was creeping toward womanhood, I found our similarities a bit unnerving. Like watching a clone of myself walk slowly toward me from a faraway point in the distance: What would happen when she arrived?”
― Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear

“She was numbed by the loss, and anger was the only thing that made her feel like she was still alive. She was embracing her anger, letting it grow inside of her like a cancer, so that she would not break down into a powerless child. She needed her anger to get her through this.”
― Karin Slaughter, Blindsighted

“That innate instinct to love a child, especially one who looks like you, coupled with the overwhelming desire to kill the needful thing, to bash its head in and run.”
― Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear

“I think of my mother, sitting at the edge of the hospital bed when I was twenty years old. Soon you’ll feel like yourself again. Young. I was so young then. Young enough to think my mother was telling me the truth. But she was pretending, wasn’t she? Always pretending. Though I don’t blame her for it, or for waiting until just the right moment to let me in on the secret. It’s all some vital game, isn’t it? No—more than a game. It’s the long, golden string of insincerity that threads together the entire human race: a shared agreement between women to insist back and forth in endless conversation that this thing we spend our whole lives preparing for—this thing we were born for—is anywhere close to what we thought it would be. And do you know the truth beneath that secret? The water beneath the ice? It never stops. You never age out of it. Your mother lies to you, and then you lie to your children, and then your children lie to their children, and then you are an old woman, looking back at your own life, lying to yourself. A lifetime of drowning, and then you are dead.”
― Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear