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

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

I am a woman on her way to eat cake.

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.

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

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

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.