Anne Frank Quotes

“Anne is remarkably restrained in calibrating the amount of fear she will admit into the diary. The air raids, the break-ins, and the brutality reported by the helpers and glimpsed from the window appear at regular intervals, so that the reader can never fully relax.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“Only a natural writer could sound as if she is not writing so much as thinking on the page.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“I am struck most strongly by her introspection, solitude, perfect self-awareness and sense of purpose…The beauty and truth of her words have transcended the limits placed upon her life by the darkness of human nature.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“The Nazis understood how useful it was to prevent the camp guards from identifying with the prisoners, to emphasize the otherness, the difference of the people whom the boxcars brought to Sobibor and Treblinka.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“Isolated in the attic, Anne could only examine her own history and her own conscience, and try to locate the wellspring of her sadness and her rage.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“In the spring of 2007, a staging of Kesselman’s version, directed by Tina Landau at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, seems to have maximized its potential.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“There it sat under my skull with my mind gripped in its tentacles. Sometimes dormant. Sometimes awakening and squeezing. Again I would react,”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“she takes me so seriously, much too seriously, and then thinks about her queer little sister for a long time afterwards, looks searchingly at me, at every word I say, and keeps on thinking: ‘Is this just a joke or does she really mean it?”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“she lacks the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions;”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“illness of Bep’s father—bad news that makes her want to fall asleep as a release from thinking.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“If he looks at me with those eyes that laugh and wink, then it’s just as if a little light goes on inside me.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“Anne tells him that his silence is, in a way, like her chatter.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“is starting to happen between the two teenagers: “It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips…and with my whole heart I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me, what is going on inside you, oh, can’t you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was “unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“I see the eight of us within our “Secret Annex” as if we were a little piece of blue heaven, surrounded by black, black rain clouds. The round, clearly defined spot where we stand is still safe, but the clouds gather more closely about us and the circle which separates us from the approaching dangers closes more and more tightly. Now we are so surrounded by danger and darkness that we bump against each other, as we search desperately for a means of escape. We all look down below, where people are fighting each other, we look above, where it is quiet and beautiful, and meanwhile we are cut off by the great dark mass.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“I have one outstanding trait in my character, which must strike anyone who knows me for any length of time, and that is my self-knowledge. I can watch myself and my actions, just like an outsider.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if…there weren’t any other people living in the world.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“Aware of how often she hides her good qualities because she is afraid of being misunderstood or mocked, she accuses herself of being uncharitable, supercilious,”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“from the earliest passages to the diary’s final entry, in which she talks about her “dual personality,” the lighthearted, superficial side that lies in wait to ambush and push away her “better, deeper, and purer” self.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“convinced us that she is telling the truth as she describes the world around her and looks inward, as if her private self is a foreign country whose geography and customs she is struggling to understand so that she can live there.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank

“end of this painful story: a man possessed and maddened enough to write such letters, and a bereaved father receiving them, until at last he reached the point at which he refused to read any more.”
― Francine Prose, Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife