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

Why are some things easier to remember the more time has passed since they occurred?

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.

-“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”-

People were crazy with pain and secrets.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

In this landI have made myself sick with silenceIn this landI have wandered, lostIn this landI hunkered down to seeWhat will become of me.In this landI held myself tightSo as not to scream.-But I did scream, so loudThat this land howled back at meAs hideouslyAs it builds its houses.In this landI have been sownOnly my head sticksDefiant, out of the earthBut one day it too will be mownMaking me, finallyOf this land.-Charlie's poem

Prison left me with some strange little tics.' She has taken all the door off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It's not that she has anxiety attacks about small spaces, she says, it's just that she starts to sweat and go cold. 'This apartment is perfect for me,' she says, looking around the open space.'How about elevators?' I ask, recalling the schlepp up the stairs. 'Exactly,' she replies, 'I don't like them much either.'One day, years later, her husband Charlie was fooling around at home, playing the guitar. Miriam said something provocative and he stood up suddenly, lifting his arm to take off the guitar strap. He was probably just going to say 'That's outrageous', or tickle her or tackle her. But she was gone. She was already down in the courtyard of the building. She does not remember getting down the stairs-it was an automatic flight reaction.

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.

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.

My father was a doctor,' she says, 'a very kind man. He died in the early '70s, relatively young.' She taps the cigarette packet on the table. 'Of lung cancer.''Oh.''But the thing about that is,' she says as she exhales, 'it doesn't take very long at all.

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.

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.

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.

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