Anna Funder Quotes
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Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?
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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.
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One does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us.
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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.
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The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance.
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Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.