Top 64 Anna Funder Quotes
#1. One does not remember one's own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us
Anna Funder
#2. Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.
Anna Funder
#3. The judge, for instance, who signed the warrant for Charlie's arrest that last time he went into remand is still on the bench.
Anna Funder
#4. There are some people just the thought of whom makes us behave better.
Anna Funder
#5. 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.
Anna Funder
#6. 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.
Anna Funder
#7. Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts.
Anna Funder
#8. For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
Anna Funder
#9. We were being offered exile on condition that we were silent about the reason we needed it. The silence chafed; it made us feel we were betraying those we had left behind. The British government was insisting on dealing with Hitler as a reasonable fellow, as if hoping he'd turn into one.
Anna Funder
#10. At ground level Alexanderplatz is a monstrous expanse of grey concrete designed to make people feel small. It works.
Anna Funder
#11. Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.
Anna Funder
#12. Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?
Anna Funder
#13. 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.
Anna Funder
#14. anti-fascist protective measure'. I have always been fond of this term which has something of the prophylactic about it, protecting easterners from the western disease of shallow materialism. It obeys all the logic of locking up free people to keep them safe from criminals.
Anna Funder
#15. The blue-eyed rabbi in our village at Samotschin used to talk to me as though I were a grown person, even when I was just a boy. We must believe in God, he told me, because if we don't we will have to believe in man, and then we will only be disappointed.
Anna Funder
#16. The penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the [GDR] were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.
Anna Funder
#18. 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.
Anna Funder
#19. At least half of what we call hope, I believe, is simply the sense that something can be done. Once,
Anna Funder
#20. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.
Anna Funder
#21. My father was a doctor,' she says, 'a very kind man. He died in the early '70s, relatively young.' She taps the cigarette packet on the table. 'Of lung cancer.'
'Oh.'
'But the thing about that is,' she says as she exhales, 'it doesn't take very long at all.
Anna Funder
#22. Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?
Anna Funder
#23. They didn't need as many external rules as we did because they had internalised the standards of decency.
Anna Funder
#24. When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.
Anna Funder
#25. Q: What does the human spirit do after ten days without sleep, and ten days of isolation tempered only by nocturnal threat sessions? A: It dreams up a solution.
Anna Funder
#26. Hagen Koch: 'There was no other transport. People on bikes could evade checkpoints, they could have secret meetings
Anna Funder
#27. In a society riven into 'us' and 'them', an ambitious young person might well want to be one of the group in the know, one of the unmolested. If there was never going to be an end to your country, and you could never leave, why wouldn't you opt for a peaceful life and a satisfying career?
Anna Funder
#28. People no longer wanted right or left - they wanted middle-of-the-road.
Anna Funder
#29. Apparently, even in the GDR, sleep deprivation amounted to torture, and torture, at least of minors, was not official policy.
Anna Funder
#30. The human brain cannot encompass total absence. Like infinity, it is simply not something that the organ runs to. The space someone leaves must be filled, so we dream forever of those who are no longer here. Our minds make them live again.
Anna Funder
#31. Lately, a study has suggested that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality, though this accuracy is not worth a bean because it is depressing, and depressed people live shorter lives. Optimists and believers are happier and healthier in their unreal worlds.
Anna Funder
#32. It was a condition of sanity both to accept 'GDR-logic' and to ignore it. 'If you took things as seriously as people in the west think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves!
Anna Funder
#33. All day long they hold what look like philosophical discussions, gesticulating slowly with their free hands and clasping tins of beer with the other. They seem to share knowledge of a world where each of them once had a place.
Anna Funder
#34. People were crazy with pain and secrets.
Anna Funder
#35. Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism. And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Nazism's successor, for forty-five years after the war ended.
Anna Funder
#36. 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.
Anna Funder
#37. This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy.
Anna Funder
#38. 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.
Anna Funder
#39. Relations between people were conditioned by the fact that one or other of you could be one of them. Everyone suspected everyone else, and the mistrust this bred was the foundation of social existence. Miriam could have been denounced
Anna Funder
#40. These handkerchief gardens are a traditional German solution to apartment dwellers' yearning for a tool shed and a vegetable garden. They make a patchwork of green in odd corners of urban land, along train lines or canals or, as here, in the lee of the Wall.
Anna Funder
#41. When Hitler came to power I was in the bath.
Anna Funder
#42. My body floated, loose from spent pleasure.
Anna Funder
#43. The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance
Anna Funder
#44. Though it is the hardest thing, to work out one's weight and heft in the world, to whittle down all that I am and give it a value.
Anna Funder
#45. 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.
Anna Funder
#46. But I must say it has been, in general, a boon not to have been a beautiful woman. Because I was barely looked at, I was free to do the looking.
Anna Funder
#47. None of us-teacher or taught-realised how an imagined romantic life can sustain a possibility, a hope, and remain like that. Like parallel train tracks, it runs alongside, but will never meet, the life you're are living.
Anna Funder
#48. 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.
Anna Funder
#49. Did he know about the doping?' Children at sports schools were given hormones under the guise of vitamins. In a scandal that has come to light since the Wall fell, the pills accelerated growth and strength, but turned the little girls halfway into boys.
Anna Funder
#50. You see the mistakes of one system - the surveillance - and the mistakes of the other - the inequality - but there's nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.
Anna Funder
#51. Children are the only people who can see adults from inside their lives, permitted to observe every small thing, as if their forming minds are incapable of judging what they see, or as if it does not lodge there, somewhere, permanently,
Anna Funder
#52. 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.
Anna Funder
#53. But there was also a car - for the GDR an expensive car, a Russian Lada - that
Anna Funder
#54. Look,' he said, 'they are just Germans who had Communism for forty years and went backwards, and all they want now is the money to have big TV sets and holidays in Majorca like everyone else. It was an experiment and it failed.
Anna Funder
#55. It is not widely known that in the end, 65 per cent of the church leaders were informers for us, and the rest of them were under surveillance anyhow.
Anna Funder
#56. And I think about those Stasi men. They would never in their lives have imagined that they would cease to exist and that their offices would be a museum. A museum!
Anna Funder
#57. Julia and her family, like many others in the GDR, trod this line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane.
Anna Funder
#58. Why is it that with women, some kink, some vulnerability of the sex, is always presumed to lie at the heart of things- as if they have no other life, no relevance as important as that which they have for us men?
Anna Funder
#59. So much of love is curiousity, a search inside the other for some little piece of self; emerging from the bear cave of them with your birthday candle and filament of ore: the same as that I'm made of!
Anna Funder
#60. In this country any kind of printing was forbidden unless authorised.
Anna Funder
#61. I wonder, now, about interrogation chambers: why do they think bright light brings the truth out of people? They should try the seduction of shadows, where you cannot watch your words hit their target.
Anna Funder
#62. There's another picture of the two of them, she with her arms around him, looking at the camera. She is an apparition, a naughty angel caught flying over the Wall, put in a cage, and then let out, here with her beloved.
Anna Funder
#63. 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.
Anna Funder
#64. In August, the Hungarians cut the barbed wire at their border with Austria, creating the first hole in the Eastern Bloc.
Anna Funder
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