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1 " Wasting time changes the nature of time. And the heart is stilled. "
― Rose Tremain , The Gustav Sonata
2 " Music is so important in a human life. It finds a space inside us that nothing else touches.’ Gustav "
3 " We have to become the people we always should have been. "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " At the age of five, Gustav Perle was certain of only one thing: he loved his mother. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
9 " Things are only white for a bit.’ Emilie "
10 " 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. "
11 " 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. "
12 " 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. "
13 " 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 "
