Megan K. Stack > Quotes

“You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done.
Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don't die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can't leave your actions over there. You can't build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of the poison seeps back into our soil.”
― Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. ... We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.”
― Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“Zelda Fitzgerald, languishing in an asylum, drew a picture of a salamander and wrote: "I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment." We have all tried to be salamanders, but nobody really survives the fire. The mystery is that some get burned worse than others; some get burned in ways that are liveable, and some do not.”
― Megan Stack

“You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“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”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“The sea pokes the horizon like the tongue of a parched man, blue corroded by salt.”
― Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

“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.”
― Megan K. Stack

“Actually is a word that has been degraded to adornment and punctuations, but it has a meaning too: it means right now, while we are on it.”
― Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

“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”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“An American reporter fell on the ground and lay there crying. I looked at her, and at the corpses. Intellectually, I knew that her reaction was appropriate, but I felt disgusted by her weakness. Staring down at the bodies, I felt numb, light, as if my own body might vaporize, as if I didn’t need to breathe.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“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.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“The cost was not, as I have been led to believe, that women had been prevented from working. Quite the opposite: we have been doing all of the work, around the clock, for centuries.

Somebody, after all, must wash and feed and train the kids and get the food and clean the house and care for the sick and elderly. That work is physically depleting, logistically daunting, and relentless. It is not a job, but a constant gaping demand for labor. It's a ceaseless work that has gobbled up our energy and stamina, eroded our collective health, and starved our communal mind of oxygen for generations.

We did the work, taught our daughters to do the work (assuming we survive their births), and then we died. That was it. Domestic toil had ground us, one after the next, to dust. We have not been educated because then, naturally, we might balk at the work. We might have the audacity to point out that we were doing all the work. We might ask the man to do some of the work, themselves. And they didn't want to do that work. Nobody wants to do the work, if they can escape it.

Still we go around thinking about our primary problem, the essence of our position, is that men explain things to us or that we make less money for the same job. but, most basically, it's the work —the work that we still, somehow, have not managed to escape. It is the work we pretend doesn't exist.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“Still I wondered: why was it that, whatever you desire, you could find a poor women to sell it? You could buy an ass or a vagina or a mouth or a tongue. You could buy a womb, a human greenhouse for unfurled human seed. You could buy hands to change diapers, voices to sing nursery rhymes, backs and arms to carry babies, breasts to flow with milk. You could buy a video of a woman truly insulted and then gagged with a penis until she vomits into a dog bowl. Such videos are popular; men watch them. But, of course, men never admit to watching such things. When it comes to culpability, it is always something else.

Prevailing culture dictates that we must separate the strands into individual phenomena: sex work, pornography, domestic labor, and surrogacy. but, in one sense all of those transactions exist along the same continuum—you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“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.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“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.”
― Megan K. Stack

“Break their bones. That’s what Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Israeli soldiers, or so the story goes. Some Israelis insist this was a command to be soft with the Palestinians. Break their bones but don’t kill them, beat them but don’t shoot them. But an American reporter who covered that intifada told me he saw Israeli soldiers systematically break the arms of little boys, one by one, working their way through a village, so they couldn’t throw rocks.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“Every woman who hires another woman for child care must struggle along the continuum. Emotion is injected and then removed from these relationships in a constant and nonsensical flux. At the whim of the employer, family sentiments are first amplified, then denied. Housekeepers and nannies who too aggressively assert the rights of the formal employment relationship tend the be harshly criticized. My thoughts rang with remembered voices of friends. These conversations boiled around me all the time. With the mothers in my building. With the women in our baby group. With my working mother friends.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“Afghans lived on the edge of mortality, its tang hung always in the air, in their words. If death would come to us all, the Afghans couldn’t be bothered to duck.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“And this is Jerusalem, world capital of dubious stories, centuries of stories half forgotten and passed on, stories of saints and prophets and torturers, everybody fighting for the best story, the one that gives you a religion, a claim, a right.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“Still I wondered: why was it that, whatever you desire, you could find a poor women to sell it? You could buy an ass or a vagina or a mouth or a tongue. You could buy a womb, a human greenhouse for unfurled human seed. You could buy hands to change diapers, voices to sing nursery rhymes, backs and arms to carry babies, breasts to flow with milk. You could buy a video of a woman truly insulted and then gagged with a penis until she vomits into a dog bowl. Such videos are popular; men watch them. But, of course, men never admit to watching such things. When it comes to culpability, it is always something else.
Prevailing culture dictates that we must separate the strands into individual phenomena: sex work, pornography, domestic labor, and surrogacy. but, in one sense all of those transactions exist along the same continuum—you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“No matter how much time I spent with the subject, no matter how intimate the interviews became, a yawning pace separated me from the people I wrote about. They had one kind of life, and I had another. I was tethered to the concreteness of the newspaper, and to the abstractions of journalism.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“His enormous grandfather clock clicked and ticked, an hour turned over. He turned his head and frowned at its face. “How does that clock know when it’s night and when it’s day? It’s a twelve-hour clock, but it never chimes at night.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“We must do the essential work of a species in sickness and in secret. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised: we are still children when we learn to conceal the pain and blood of menstruation. We understand that the denial of our physical shell is the price of admission. We can join the men at work so long as we leave our bodies behind, or pretend that our bodies are just like their bodies. There is quiet sympathy from other women, but you must hide these things from the men because, as soon as they finish nodding gravely and sympathetically, they will remind you that this biological discrepancy was their point all along, and they will show you the door. Biology will be twisted into a rope and used to bind you.”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home

“is happy, then who will know sadness?”
― Megan K. Stack, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home