The Gustav Sonata Quotes

“Music is so important in a human life. It finds a space inside us that nothing else touches.’ Gustav”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“We have to become the people we always should have been.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Wasting time changes the nature of time. And the heart is stilled.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“And he feels grateful that he has been left with this one substantial relic of all his years of service and thinks how sincerely he has deserved this. Yet he knows the world in which people deserve things or do not deserve them is passing away. Europe is at war. Fairness is now becoming a word without meaning.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“he thought that this was how he was going to live life from now on, savouring small pleasures and not looking beyond them for happiness that was more complete.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“He fell over frequently, but he never cried, though the ice was hard, the hardest surface his bones had ever met. He taught himself to laugh instead. Laughing was a bit like crying. It was a strange convulsion; it just came from a different bit of your mind. The trick was to move the crying out of that bit and let the laughter in. And so he'd pick himself up and carry on, laughing.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“At the age of five, Gustav Perle was certain of only one thing: he loved his mother.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“There is such fear and exhaustion in their eyes that Erich says to Roger Erdman one morning, "I find it difficult to look at them."
"I agree," says Roger. "Because it could be us on those hard benches. And that's what we're most afraid of - to look out there and see ourselves.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Things are only white for a bit.’ Emilie”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Although Emilie Perle had schooled him well in how to love without being loved in return, he could now see how this state of lovelessness had made him obsessive in his quest for superficial order and control.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“And he understood that now, more than ever in his life, there was nothing and no one to cushion him from the hardness of the earth.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Trust you to mention love, Gustav. But the word has no meaning for me any more. I’m enslaved to Hans Hirsch, that’s all I know – because he’s beautiful and because he has power over me. Thank goodness my father died. Armin always saw right through me. He would have known that what I’ve got is slavery, nothing more nor less.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“epidemic of some contagious illness to which they had already fallen victim.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Armin feel very ashamed. Ashamed of the banking system. Ashamed of Switzerland. These are terrible, unpatriotic things to feel. And I wonder if it isn’t this shame which has allowed his illness in.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“in this way is very bad for the country. We always thought the banks behaved with absolute probity, despite their code of secrecy. We, the Jews, trusted them. We believed all that gold had been returned to its rightful owners, wherever they or their descendants could be found, but it seems this is not so.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Armin Zwiebel. His politeness towards strangers, his courtesy towards Gustav, his love for Adriana, to all of this he had remained true. But Adriana told Gustav that Armin had been very depressed, in recent months, by the international accusations against certain Swiss banks that, having received gold and other treasure from the Nazis during the war – treasure taken from Jewish families sent to the death camps – these banks had made ‘insufficient effort’ to trace the rightful heirs to this vast fortune.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“He wanted to say, The person I love most in the world is about to leave me forever, but he knew these words were impossible to utter.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“something, but she slept on, unmoving. There was more – plenty more – that he could have said, but he knew that the time for saying it was long past.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“towards Irma, seemingly burning or giving away every last item that had belonged to him?”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Wasting time changes the nature of time.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“He appeared to Gustav like a caricature of a reserved English gentleman, with brilliantined white hair, a rosy complexion and a ridiculous little moustache, trimmed so close to his top lip, it resembled a worn-out nail brush.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“For what's the point in thinking about an end to your present sorrows, when you're a prisoner of events, a prisoner of time.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“The December night was cold and Anton had no coat. Gustav took off his woollen scarf and wrapped it round Anton’s thin neck and Anton led the way, pounding very fast, towards Marinplatz, towards a dark beer cellar they used to frequent when they were young. They”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“Gustav waited. He wondered whether he wanted to know the thing she was about to tell him, or whether it wasn't better for certain knowledge to remain hidden, so that the mind could conjure its own stories from out of the past, stories it could bear to live with, stories which, in time, took on their own reality and seemed to become true.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

“She'd told Gustav never to cry. But it seemed that this rule didn't apply to her, because there were times, late at night, when Gustav would creep out of his room to find Emilie weeping over the pages of the Matzlingerzeitung. At these moments, her breath often smelled of aniseed and she would be clutching a glass clouded with yellow liquid, and Gustav felt afraid of these things - of her aniseed breath and the dirty glass and his mother's tears.”
― Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata