Valent’s Reviews > Yesteryear > Status Update

"And also: how practical. Even if they never actually did it: what a clever way to shackle me to this ranch, to make me never want to leave. Now I would never drive off the property again without wondering if today was going to be the day.
After all: What were good Christian men if not experts at making their good Christian women vanish from the world?"

"That's what they'd told me to do, right? All those women who came before me? Be a mother, be a wife, and keep the household clean.
Liars. Every Christian woman I ever met had been a big fat lying bastard. Lord have mercy on their big fat lying bastard souls."

"A lesson it had taken me much longer to learn: sometimes the love of strangers is much more terrifying than the hate".

"–You'll develop a taste for it, and then you'll be obsessed.
Back in my dorm that night, I went online and learned about the pigs who were trained to seek out those delicacies in the wild. The smell was so intoxicating to them, it nearly drove them mad.
People aren't so different from pigs. Once they learn a rotten thing can be eaten, they will eat it, and then they'll become addicted to it".

"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're dead."

"–Aren't you a sight for sore eyes, little lady.
An impossible thing to imagine, what might happen if my husband ever paused and thought about the governing law of his own starry universe: his wife might as well have been a farm dog, for all the rights she had.
Even the sweetest, stupidest man can grow cruel and cunning when he learns a thing like that."

"He was a nice, dumb rich kid. And what did that make me? A fool. An embarrassment of a woman. At the most important moment in my life, I'd made a critical error of judgment: I'd mistaken a man's wealth for his intellect. I'd assumed that Caleb's presence at Harvard justified some sort of success of critical thinking skills–but it hadn't considered until now that he'd gotten in on the worth of his last name alone."

"She would spend her twenties feeling disappointed and labeling it gratitude, and then she would convince herself that this was a form of Buddhist enlightenment: be happy with what you have. This is what she would tell herself each time she was faced with the fact that she had once again received less money, less praise, and even a smaller portion of blow than her male coworkers."

"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. It was unfathomable to me: the idea of floating forward through the world, held up by absolute nothing. What kept you from plummeting?"

"A trade must take place for this life to enter the world. As my body slowly halved open like a peach, I realized it was me who was losing my life; me who would vanish from the world to make room for this new child. I'll never be Natalie again. I will only ever be Mama. For one single moment, I wished the child gone. Not just out of me, but out of this world."