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Top Anna Funder Quotes

Browse top 49 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Anna Funder.

Favorite Anna Funder Quotes

1. "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
2. "When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says." ~ Anna Funder
3. "Such applications were sometimes granted because the GDR, unlike any other eastern European country, could rid itself of malcontents by ditching them into West Germany, where they were automatically granted citizenship. The Stasi put all applicants under extreme scrutiny. People who applied to leave were, unsurprisingly, suspected of wanting to leave which was, other than by this long-winded and arbitrary process, a crime. An ‘application to leave' was legal, but the authorities might, if the fancy took them, choose to see it as a statement of why you didn't like the GDR. In that case it became a Hetzschrift (a smear) or a Schmäschrift (a libel) and therefore a criminal offence." ~ Anna Funder
4. "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
5. "Stasi File Authority—Project Group Reconstruction Time required for the Reconstruction: 1 worker reconstructs on average 10 pages per day 40 workers reconstruct on average 400 pages per day 40 workers reconstruct on average in a year of 250 working days 100,000 pages There are, on average 2,500 pages in one sack 100,000 pages amounts to 40 sacks per year In all, at the Stasi File Authority there are 15,000 sacks This means that to reconstruct everything it would take 40 workers 375 years." ~ Anna Funder
6. "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
7. "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
8. "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
9. "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
10. "The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance" ~ Anna Funder
11. "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
12. "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
13. "In this landI have made myself sick with silenceIn this landI have wandered, lostIn this landI hunkered down to seeWhat will become of me.In this landI held myself tightSo as not to scream.-But I did scream, so loudThat this land howled back at meAs hideouslyAs it builds its houses.In this landI have been sownOnly my head sticksDefiant, out of the earthBut one day it too will be mownMaking me, finallyOf this land.-Charlie's poem" ~ Anna Funder
14. "There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent." ~ Anna Funder
15. "The Stasi had used radiation to mark people and objects it wanted to track. It developed a range of radioactive tags including irradiated pins it could surreptitiously insert into a person's clothing, radioactive magnets to place on cars, and radioactive pellets to shoot into tyres." ~ Anna Funder
16. "Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts." ~ Anna Funder
17. "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
18. "In the GDR people were required to acknowledge an assortment of fictions as fact. Some of these fictions were fundamental, such as the idea that human nature is a work-in-progress which can be improved upon, and that Communism is the way to do it. Others were more specific: that East Germans were not the Germans responsible (even in part) for the Holocaust; that the GDR was a multi-party democracy; that socialism was peace-loving; that there were no former Nazis left in the country; and that, under socialism, prostitution did not exist." ~ Anna Funder
19. "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
20. "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
21. "History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler's regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century. In Dresden once, on a blue" ~ Anna Funder
22. "To start a new country, with new values and newly minted socialist citizens, it is necessary to begin at the beginning: with children. Schoolteachers in the eastern regions were immediately dismissed because their job had been to educate children in the values of the Nazi regime. Socialist teachers had to be created." ~ Anna Funder
23. "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
24. "one does not remember one's own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us" ~ Anna Funder
25. "I am a woman on her way to eat cake." ~ Anna Funder
26. "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
27. "When Hitler came to power I was in the bath." ~ Anna Funder
28. "People were crazy with pain and secrets." ~ Anna Funder
29. "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
30. "Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?" ~ Anna Funder
31. "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
32. "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
33. "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
34. "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
35. "Hagen Koch: 'There was no other transport. People on bikes could evade checkpoints, they could have secret meetings" ~ Anna Funder
36. "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
37. "But in Potsdam people come up and say'—he puts on a small sorry voice—‘"You were right. Capitalism is even worse than you told us it would be. In the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open!"' You didn't need to, I think, they could see inside anyway." ~ Anna Funder
38. "For almost a year, from June 1948 to October 1949, they kept the city alive by plane. In that time American and British planes made some 277,728 flights through Soviet airspace to drop bundles of food, clothing, cigarettes, medicine, fuel and equipment, including components for a new power station, to the people of West Berlin. In the west, the aircraft came to be known as the ‘Rosinenbomber', or ‘raisin bombers', because they brought food. But in the east, Koch and his classmates were told the enemy planes sprayed potato beetles over East German crops as they flew over, in order to spoil the harvest." ~ Anna Funder
39. "At ground level Alexanderplatz is a monstrous expanse of grey concrete designed to make people feel small. It works." ~ Anna Funder
40. "In this country any kind of printing was forbidden unless authorised." ~ Anna Funder
41. "Why did people need a permit to ride a bike?' I ask. ‘Because they could bring messages! Pass on news!' Koch cries. ‘There was no other transport. People on bikes could evade checkpoints, they could have secret meetings.' Clearly the atmosphere of paranoid control had set in early under the Russians." ~ Anna Funder
42. "The Stasi had developed a quasi-scientific method, ‘smell sampling', as a way to find criminals. The theory was that we all have our own identifying odour, which we leave on everything we touch. These smells can be captured and, with the help of trained sniffer dogs, compared to find a match. The Stasi would take its dogs and jars to a location where they suspected an illegal meeting had occurred, and see if the dogs could pick up the scents of the people whose essences were captured in the jars." ~ Anna Funder
43. "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
44. "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
45. "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
46. "Von Schnitzler's job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR—anything from news items to game shows to ‘Dallas'—and rip it to shreds. ‘That man radiated so much nastiness he simply wasn't credible. You'd come away feeling sullied, as if you'd spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone." ~ Anna Funder
47. "In August, the Hungarians cut the barbed wire at their border with Austria, creating the first hole in the Eastern Bloc." ~ Anna Funder
48. "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
49. "She says that in January 1990 when the Berliners saw the smoke coming out of the chimneys they came here to protest. They brought bricks and rocks and built a symbolic wall around the building, to get the Stasi to stop burning the files. She says it is extraordinary that, with all those stones, not one was thrown and that, conversely, not one shot was fired from this building." ~ Anna Funder

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He checked the barometer he'd nailed to the family room wall: the pressure was rising."
Author: Anthony Doerr

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Thin
Hey
Ear
Wit
Here
Use
Per
Con
Lit
German
Lie
Year
Mad
West
Cause
Act
Pen
Sin
She
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Cat
Hit
Hen
Tan
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Came
Ally
Cent
Self
King
Small
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Son
Apart
Saw
Round
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Tie
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Build
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