Pam Neale

“Etsuko had to go back to the restaurant, but she settled on the sofa for a few minutes. When she had been a young mother there used to be only one time in her waking hours where she’d felt a kind of peace, and that was always after her children went to bed for the night. She longed to see her sons as they were back then: their legs chubby and white, their mushroom haircuts misshapen because they could never sit still at the barber. She wished she could take back the times she had scolded her children just because she was tired. There were so many errors. If life allowed revisions, she would let them stay in their bath a little longer, read them one more story before bed, and fix them another plate of shrimp.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Besides, my confidence that every person can be cured of his or her false beliefs through evidence has meanwhile significantly diminished. Oh, Mr. Brecht, I often think, people can really see an apple fall to the ground an simultaneously believe it when someone claims: It isn't falling. And there it is still the matter of more obvious natural laws!”
― Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr

“The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or other, splits at the joints?”
― Christa Wolf, City of Angels or Overcoat of Dr. Freud

“It didn't happen the way one can tell it; but if once can tell it as it was, then one wasn't in on it, or it all happened so long ago that candor comes too easily. In order to make the story tellable, one has to separate and put into sequence events which in reality were so entangled as to be inexplicable...”
― Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T.