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 absen….

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,….

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, f….

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

one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us.

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

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 st….

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 th….

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

I am a woman on her way to eat cake..

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 mo….

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 t….

There are no people who are whole" he says. "Everyone has issues of their own to deal with. Mine might be a little harder, but the main thing is how ….

I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange - at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me lear….

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 fi….

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 t….

Memory, like so much else, is unreliable. Not only for what it hides and what it alters, but also for what it reveals..

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so..