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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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, All That I Am

“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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“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, All That I Am

“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, All That I Am

“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, All That I Am

“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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“People were crazy with pain and secrets.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“In this land
I have made myself sick with silence
In this land
I have wandered, lost
In this land
I hunkered down to see
What will become of me.
In this land
I held myself tight
So as not to scream.
-But I did scream, so loud
That this land howled back at me
As hideously
As it builds its houses.
In this land
I have been sown
Only my head sticks
Defiant, out of the earth
But one day it too will be mown
Making me, finally
Of this land.
-Charlie's poem”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“I am a woman on her way to eat cake.”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“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, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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, All That I Am

“When Hitler came to power I was in the bath.”
― Anna Funder, All That I Am

“Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.
I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.
She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long.
The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“People no longer wanted right or left—they wanted middle-of-the-road.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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, All That I Am

“Prison left me with some strange little tics.' She has taken all the door off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It's not that she has anxiety attacks about small spaces, she says, it's just that she starts to sweat and go cold. 'This apartment is perfect for me,' she says, looking around the open space.
'How about elevators?' I ask, recalling the schlepp up the stairs.
'Exactly,' she replies, 'I don't like them much either.'
One day, years later, her husband Charlie was fooling around at home, playing the guitar. Miriam said something provocative and he stood up suddenly, lifting his arm to take off the guitar strap. He was probably just going to say 'That's outrageous', or tickle her or tackle her. But she was gone. She was already down in the courtyard of the building. She does not remember getting down the stairs-it was an automatic flight reaction.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“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, All That I Am

“This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall