The Lady in Gold Quotes

“Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“Any nonsense can attain importance by virtue of being believed by millions of people,” Einstein”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“to every age its art; to art its freedom.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“The lawyer was Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of a venerated Viennese composer who had fled the rise of Hitler. The return of this ominous heir was anything but welcome. The painting Schoenberg sought was a shimmering gold masterpiece, painted a century earlier, by the artistic heretic Gustav Klimt. It was a portrait of a Viennese society beauty, Adele Bloch-Bauer.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“Vienna art institutions had turned out to be more corrupt than Klimt had ever imagined.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“Then a new generation emerged, of Austrians who did not drink from the communal well of self-pity, denial, and deceit.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“Austrians were allowed to paper over their pasts and portray themselves as unwilling participants. They felt sorry for themselves, and for the proud family names sullied with the taint of Nazi collaboration. The Cold War began in earnest, and the West was eager to hang on to Austria. A 1948 amnesty brought a premature end to Austrian de-Nazification. Austrians began to deny their jubilant welcome of Hitler and to claim that Austria had been “occupied” by Germany, like”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“Repentance was scarce. Austria was awash in self-pity.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“Then, improbably, a door opened. In 1948, the state of Israel was declared…Nelly loved her new home from the moment she saw the ancient stones of Jerusalem in the desert sun. She was not a Zionist, or a partisan. She was an orphan of a hostile world. Now she had a refuge. A place where people who had lived through hell were embracing life, joy, idealism, and love.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“In this bleak Vienna, there was almost no one left who had not betrayed the decency of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“The racially loaded culture wars of turn-of-the-century Vienna were on. It was only a matter of time before “degenerate” would be aimed at Jews.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“where”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“of dark passageways, their footsteps echoing. Schoenberg”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“antithetical to the new Germanic cultural identity undermined”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“His name, Adolf, was from an old German name meaning “noble wolf.” His surname was chosen by his father, Alois Schicklgruber, who was born out of wedlock and as an adult adopted a variation of the name of the man his mother had later married, Hiedler, spelling it “Hitler.” Hitler was Austrian, though the world forgets this.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“Adele’s life was a triumph of Jewish assimilation, but her portrait was a relic of assimilation’s tragic failure. Adele symbolized one of the most brilliant moments in time, but also one of the world’s greatest thefts: of all that was lost when one woman and an entire people were stripped of their identity, their dignity, and their lives.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“In fact, Hitler was the beneficiary of kindness from Jewish Viennese…The Jewish owner of a frame and window store, Samuel Morgenstern, became the buyer of Hitler’s drawings and watercolors. Morgenstern, a kind, entirely self-made man, felt sorry for Hitler and managed to interest his customers in Hitler’s mediocre architectural scenes…”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“Hitler was Austrian, though the world forgets this.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“The Jew is not a burden upon the Charities of the State, nor of the city. When he is well enough to work, he works; when he is incapacitated his own people take care of him,” Twain wrote a friend in Vienna. “His race is entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races of men.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“To please many is immoral.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“The discovery of a golden scroll in a child’s grave near Vienna with a Jewish prayer—“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is Our God! The Lord is One!”—placed the Jewish presence at least as far back as the third century, suggesting Jews were co-founders of Roman Austria.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

“Like many things and many people in Austria, the bunker beneath the Belvedere possessed a mysterious pedigree.”
― Anne-Marie O'Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer