Alma De Groen

LIZ: Any explanation nowadays is comforting. I became an historian because I was in love with the idea of continuance... of something epic and ongoing that I was in service to. But it pretty soon dawned on me that the history of the majority of humanity simply didn't exist. And when you look at the history that DOES exist, you realise it's been defined by one sex. The Renaissance and the Reformation were anything but high points for women. We lost nine million in the witch burnings – for crimes like making penises disappear.

KATHERINE: She told me once she wished she hadn't married, had been an explorer instead.
[She smiles, remembering.]
The rivers of China, she thought... I asked her what she knew about the rivers of China, because Mother knew no geography whatever - less than a child of ten. She agreed she knew nothing, then she said, 'But I can *feel* the sort of hat I should wear!'

VICKI: Do what Hemingway used to do when he got stuck.
JOY: What? Blow my brains out?
VICKI: Say to yourself: 'All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'
JOY: [angrily] My whole life's been turned around. How do I know what's true any more? You don't know what it's like to know you're writing abysmally and there's nothing you can do about it. Everything I write turns into a tirade of hate. And that's fatal. According to Virginia Woolf one should never reveal one's anger. It has to be art, not self-expression. And she put rocks in her pockets and jumped in a pond! How do I strike a balance? If you're not angry what you write is irrelevant. If you are angry it sounds like hysterical over-reacting.

ZOE: What happens if we get home and you're not happy there, either?
JIM: [confidently] It won't happen.
ZOE: I don't even know if I want to come with you. I don't think I could face the disappointment.
JIM: There won't be any disappointment.
ZOE: Why not? Every place we've been to we've blamed it on the country and not on ourselves.

LIZ: Manning Clark talked about needing to comfort himself; perhaps that's what historians do – look for comfort amidst the terror.

AKHMATOVA: Why does it take more and more horror to feel anything, Lilli? One imagines the guards opening the doors of that cattle truck when it reached Siberia and finding their prisoners entombed in a wall of ice, and wonders what they felt? Did they feel anything? I'm not sure I would have–only a sort of bemused wonder. And Meyerhold's wife? They took out her eyes. All I could think was, what did they do with them? Did they leave them in the apartment with the body, or take them away? And if so, what did they do with the eyes? They want us to die while we're still alive.