5 Quotes by Megan K. Stack

I was ready for all of that. I wanted the baby so hungrily I'd shorten my life or wreck my body. I was prepared to complete one less book than I might otherwise have published over my lifetime. I wanted the baby, and I would make the trade. No woman needs to convince me that she would give her life for her children, because every mother has already given her life for her children. That is the first thing that happens.

You should write about all of this,' he told me. 'All of what?''Becoming a mother.''No!'This suggestion made me furious, it seemed to me that every college-educated woman with a laptop, a baby, and a sketchy grasp of grammar had reinvented herself as a 'mommy blogger.' Not that, no way—not for me. I had fought too hard and too long to go down like that.

As it turned out, the first thing I knew about war was also the truest, and maybe it’s as true for nations as for individuals: You can survive and not survive, both at the same time.

You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here.

Here is the mental rearrangement: People who live in a dictatorship will tell you the most with awkward silences, the fear that flashes on their faces, and the implausible exclamations of rote enthusiasm. It’s what they don’t say that counts. You have to consider the negative space, to trace the air that surrounds the form to get an idea of its shape, because nobody will dare to articulate the thing itself.