“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“-“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 wa”

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

“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.”

“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 on deals with them.”

“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.”

“Ten days is time enough to die, to be born, to fall in love and to go mad. Ten days is a very long time.”

“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.”