"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."

--

Source : Anna Funder (2011). “Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall”, p.252, Granta Books

Anna Funder

#Fighting Quotes #Ideas Quotes #Arena Quotes

“I always want more, and that's just my life.”
“I came to realize that exaggerated concern about what others are doing can be foolish. It can paralyze effort, and stifle a good idea. One finds that in the history of science, almost every problem has been worked out by someone else. This should not discourage anyone from pursuing his own path.”
“The place was built on the premise that people want to gamble, and they may as well do it here. They look after their clientele, and, hell, they treat me like I'm one of their family.”
“An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.”

Source : "Conversations with Carl Sagan". Book edited by Tom Head, p. 70, 2006.
“As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.”
“We become male automatically because of the Y chromosome and the little magic peanut, but if we are to become men we need the helpof other men--we need our fathers to model for us and then to anoint us, we need our buddies to share the coming-of-age rituals with us and to let us join the team of men, and we need myths of heroes to inspire us and to show us the way.”
“My grandmother is a Holocaust survivor. Some heroes of mine have long been the Jewish Partisans, these young people who just went into the woods with whatever guns and bombs and what not they could get their hands on, and just would fight Nazis, and try to help people escape.”
“And if this is illegal, then sue me!”

You may also like:

Christos Tsiolkas
Author
Elliot Perlman
Author
Ernst Toller
Playwright
Helen Garner
Novelist
Kate Grenville
Author
Miles Franklin
Writer
Peter Carey
Novelist
Thomas Keneally
Novelist
Tim Winton
Novelist