
In August, the Hungarians cut the barbed wire at their border with Austria, creating the first hole in the Eastern Bloc. —
Anna Funder

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

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

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

People were crazy with pain and secrets. —
Anna Funder

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

When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. —
Anna Funder

At ground level Alexanderplatz is a monstrous expanse of grey concrete designed to make people feel small. It works. —
Anna Funder

People no longer wanted right or left - they wanted middle-of-the-road. —
Anna Funder

They didn't need as many external rules as we did because they had internalised the standards of decency. —
Anna Funder

The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance —
Anna Funder

Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred? —
Anna Funder

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

I am a woman on her way to eat cake. —
Anna Funder

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

Apparently, even in the GDR, sleep deprivation amounted to torture, and torture, at least of minors, was not official policy. —
Anna Funder

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

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

In this country any kind of printing was forbidden unless authorised. —
Anna Funder

This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy. —
Anna Funder

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

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

At least half of what we call hope, I believe, is simply the sense that something can be done. Once, —
Anna Funder

There are some people just the thought of whom makes us behave better. —
Anna Funder

But there was also a car - for the GDR an expensive car, a Russian Lada - that —
Anna Funder

One does not remember one's own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us —
Anna Funder