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

I am a woman on her way to eat cake.

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 learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

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.

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

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 absence) - this vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know.

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