Burkhard Bilger > Quotes

“One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. "This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older," Eagleman said--why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.”
― Burkhard Bilger

“The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present—processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?”
― Burkhard Bilger

“The downside of erasing history is that you lose what’s beautiful as well as what’s hard to bear.”
― Burkhard Bilger, Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets

“I’ve never been to America,” he said. “But I’ve read that you tend to put people on a pedestal or tear them down. They’re heroes or traitors. But man is by nature flawed, and he has to live with the fact that he contradicts himself. That’s what makes him a man. Otherwise, he would be a cuckoo clock.”
― Burkhard Bilger, Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets