“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.”

“Perhaps because of all the money poured into this, the things behind the spanking displays look old and crummy, like articles from a time that has been left behind. I slap down the stairs in my sandals. I am annoyed that this past can look so tawdry and so safe, as if destined from the outset to end up behind glass, securely roped off and under pressure-button control. And I am annoyed at myself: what's the problem? Isn't a museum the place for things that are over?”

“Though it is the hardest thing, to work out one's weight and heft in the world, to whittle down all that I am and give it a value.”

“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.”

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

“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 to see it at all.”

“When Hitler came to power I was in the bath.”