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

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

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

-“Forced love hurts God.”
-“How can you hurt something that doesn’t exist?”-“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.”- “I was once so open to the world it hurts”- “Act natural is the worst thing you can say to an actor. They simply forget how to be.”-“Until the first thing they learn are the last thing they forget.” -“It wasn’t just talking back to him, it was the confidence to be calm doing it.”-“The fact that the nation has gone to war does not make those who opposed it at the beginning, and those who oppose it now, traitors.”-“This beauty is a force, and it will never lose.”-“how a cause cements two people, masks their differences as secondary to the purpose at hand”-

— Anna Funder

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

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

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

— Anna Funder

In this land have made myself sick with silence In this land have wandered, lost In this land hunkered down to see What will become of me. In this land held myself tights as not to scream.-But I did scream, so loud That this land howled back at mean hideously As it builds its houses. In this land 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

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

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