Short War Quotes

“the years immediately after the election, Nina wanted to atone for every American misdeed since our great-grandfather immigrated in 1929. She still does, though her new job at an immigrant-services nonprofit seems to be making her feel more purposeful, which is her code word for “virtuous.” If she’s lucky, it will eventually teach her the lesson she needs, which is how to feel small.”
― Lily Meyer, Short War

“I resent that Nina holds herself accountable for my birth mother’s fate. Her logic offends me. If she, as Ray Lazris’s granddaughter and as an American taxpayer, is guilty of the atrocities committed by Augusto Pinochet and his CIA-backed regime, then so am I. Her concept of historical responsibility would have me shoulder the blame for my mother’s suffering, or else identify myself strongly enough with that mother and that suffering to become a victim of harm perpetrated against a body that is not mine. I”
― Lily Meyer, Short War

“Basilica de la Merced, the last Catholic outpost on San Pedro Nolasco’s old block. “All this,” Nico said, waving his arm to encompass two copy shops, a Chinese restaurant, a”
― Lily Meyer, Short War

“Her father hesitated. “No parent wants their child to think of them as a failure.” “You think you’re a failure?” “I know.” Nina screwed her eyes shut. Sorrow flooded through her. She heard the list her dad wasn’t reciting: failed Communist, failed activist, failed lover, failed protector, failed parent, failed friend. Nico always said her dad believed he should have been able to save Andrés somehow. Maybe he’d never actually—or never only—been talking about Andrés.”
― Lily Meyer, Short War

“Faults and flaws boiled around her. Not the book’s or her father’s: her own. She was self-obsessed. Overreactive. A drama queen. A story leech sucking up other people’s pain. In college, she’d tried to wear her dad’s grief like hand-me-down clothes. Now she was—what? Nina dropped herself into the hammock stretched across the balcony. If she”
― Lily Meyer, Short War

“Her dad’s favorite painting, an early Claudio Aristeguieta, occupied the room’s back wall. To Nina, it looked like wet sand, but she knew that it reminded her father of the happier years of his adolescence, the fervent Communist stage he still saw, more than forty years later, as the life he should have kept living. She wished she could give him a tour of the life he had now. Show him, as if he were an outsider, how good it was, how enjoyable his existence could be.”
― Lily Meyer, Short War

“How could it be that in Chile, in June 1973, when the average bread line stretched two blocks and a sweet potato cost more than a pack of cigarettes, the Polo Club could have a buffet?”
― Lily Meyer, Short War