57 Quotes by Anna Funder

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People were crazy with pain and secrets.

I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.