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.

  Anna Funder

  Taken, Two, Worry

  Anna Funder (2011). “Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall”, p.285, Granta Books

  46 Copy quote

• 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

  Issues, People, Littles

  Anna Funder (2011). “Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall”, p.238, Granta Books

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Unreliable

  Anna Funder (2011). “Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall”, p.221, Granta Books

  6 Copy quote

• This vast life - the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know.

  Anna Funder

  Dream, Real, Together

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Betrayal, Psychology, Mistress

  9 Copy quote

• Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.

  Anna Funder

  Suffering Of Others, People, Imagination

  7 Copy quote

• one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

  Anna Funder

  Pain, Suffering Of Others, Doe

  6 Copy quote

• Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?

  Anna Funder

  Past, Grit, Pearls

  Anna Funder (2011). “Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall”, p.162, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Past, People, Ordinary

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Fighting, Ideas, Arena

  Anna Funder (2011). “Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall”, p.252, Granta Books

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Running, Space

  7 Copy quote

• Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts.

  Anna Funder

  East, West, Drank

  Anna Funder (2011). “Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall”, p.96, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Our Love, Who We Are, Remember

  Anna Funder (2012). “All That I Am: A Novel”, p.13, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

• The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance

  Anna Funder

  Cynicism, Creation, Glances

  Anna Funder (2011). “All That I Am”, p.111, Penguin UK

  8 Copy quote

• I am a woman on her way to eat cake.

  Anna Funder

  Cake, Way

  Anna Funder (2011). “All That I Am”, p.153, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

• I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange - at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

  Anna Funder

  Beautiful, School, Names

  Anna Funder (2011). “Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall”, p.10, Granta Books

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Light, People

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Watches, Saws

  Anna Funder (2012). “All That I Am: A Novel”, p.10, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

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