Anna Funder Quotes
I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.
There are no people who are whole" he says. "Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how on deals with them.
Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.
Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.
Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.
one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us
We don't catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.
Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?
I had very good eyes once. Though it's another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.
Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts.
At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.
Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can't look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn't get back.
In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.
She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was.
Ten days is time enough to die, to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a very long time.
When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human, ' Miriam says.
He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.
People were crazy with pain and secrets.
Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?