Postcards from No Man's Land Truth Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #4

"Her honesty. About herself. About everybody. She wants to know about everything. And she sees through everything. She's a thinker. She was fifteen when … they took her." (4.108)

Perhaps that's because Anne's writing in a diary, Jacob—so of course her ideas are hers alone, since they weren't (originally) intended for a larger audience. It's intriguing to think about Anne Frank's thoughts as being honest for her in her time, but somehow for Jacob as well, fifty years later. Truth has no time period or place, it seems.

Quote #5

"That's one reason why I love Rembrandt. His truthfulness. Always honest. Loves people and loves them just as they are. Never afraid of life as it is." (8.46)

Daan loves that Rembrandt is truthful, even though it's art. We think it's more fascinating to think that both Daan and Jacob specifically love art because of is honesty, as though it can't be found in the real world except through art.

Quote #6

"Here is memory. For me now there is only memory. Memory and pain. All life is memory. Pain is of now, forgotten as soon as gone. But memory lives. And grows. And changes too. Like the clouds I can see through my window. Bright and billowy sometimes. Blanketing the sky sometimes. Storm-tossed sometimes. Thin and long and high sometimes. Low and grey and brooding sometimes. And sometimes not there at all, only the cloudless blue, so peaceful, so endless. So longed for. But let us not talk of death. Only of clouds. Always the same and yet never the same. Uncertain. Unreliable, therefore. Unpredictable." (10.24)

Remember when you were a kid? Chances are that you remember some things differently than your mom, even though you lived through the same experience. Memory isn't truthful sometimes, because we can change it over time. So how do we know what really happened in the past without memory?