Quotes from Rose Tremain

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.

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.

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.

Birinin ac?s?, diÄŸerinin kazanc?d?r, ha, Efendim? Bu gerçeÄŸi biliriz deÄŸil mi?

He couldn't deceive himself. He always looked things in the eye and never pretended that what he saw was not really happening.

Ho notato questo negli esseri umani; l'essere a conoscenza di un segreto li fa sorridere. E' il sorriso del potere.

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.

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

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.

epidemic of some contagious illness to which they had already fallen victim.

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.

What mattered was writing it: the act of words.

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.

Life should be embraced like a lover.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

Music is so important in a human life. It finds a space inside us that nothing else touches.' Gustav

We have to become the people we always should have been.

Acceptance, she thinks, is the harshest lesson life teaches and the one most important to learn.

And it is silence that she hears, the silence of lost years that have no voice left in them.

Wasting time changes the nature of time. And the heart is stilled.

He'd never seen a rain quite like this so gentle that it seemed barely to fall yet slowly laid its shine on the bay leaves and hydrangea flowers…