Top 35 Anna Funder Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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 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

4. “When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,′ Miriam says.”

— Anna Funder

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Anna Funder

11. “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

12. “The pills sit in there in their colours and shapes ready to push me, in plastic-coated increments, into my future.”

— Anna Funder

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “I am a woman on her way to eat cake.”

— Anna Funder

19. “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

20. “The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance.”

— Anna Funder

21. “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

22. “Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?”

— Anna Funder

23. “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

24. “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

25. “The mistake the GDR made was to force people into a position,’ the dark man says, ‘either you are for us or an enemy. And if you then came to think of yourself as an enemy you had to ask yourself: what am I doing here? They wanted to put everything into their narrow schema, but life simply didn’t fit into it.’ He pauses, and the others wait for him to finish. ‘I think we need to remember that they came here for the freedom, not for fifteen kinds of ketchup.”

— 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. “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

28. “They didn’t need as many external rules as we did because they had internalised the standards of decency.”

— Anna Funder

29. “Some people are comfortable talking about their lives, as if they can make sense of the progression of random events that made them what they are. This involves a kind of forward-looking faith in life; a conviction that cause and effect are linked, and that they are themselves more than the sum of their past.”

— Anna Funder

30. “Apparently, even in the GDR, sleep deprivation amounted to torture, and torture, at least of minors, was not official policy.”

— Anna Funder

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

— Anna Funder

32. “None of us–teacher or taught–realised how an imagined romantic life can sustain you as a possibility, a hope, and remain just that. Like parallel train tracks, it runs alongside, but will never meet, the life you are living.”

— Anna Funder

33. “In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.”

— Anna Funder

34. “Perhaps because of all the money poured into this, the things behind the spanking displays look old and crummy, like articles from a time that has been left behind. I slap down the stairs in my sandals. I am annoyed that this past can look so tawdry and so safe, as if destined from the outset to end up behind glass, securely roped off and under pressure-button control. And I am annoyed at myself: what’s the problem? Isn’t a museum the place for things that are over?”

— Anna Funder

35. “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

36. “To understand her,” I say, “you have to understand what she was trying to do. Dora was... a verb.”

— Anna Funder

37. “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

38. “My body floated, loose from spent pleasure.”

— Anna Funder

39. “This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy.”

— Anna Funder