30 Quotes by Jessica Shattuck

This is what Ania will pay for: not only her inaction, but her self-deception, for narrating away evil while staring it in the face.

Standing at the grave, Marianne was suddenly aware of her own blindness; her dearest friends were like dreams she had woken from. How had she missed so much?

He is against politics in general and longs for the restitution of the monarchy. They have seen nothing but rioting and inflation in the five years since Wilhelm II abdicated. And Ania knows not to mention the Communists. Her father has not recovered from the shock of their brief takeover of Bavaria, which, for a few weeks in 1919, became the Bavarian Soviet Republic. If he begins on the subject, no one will hear of anything else for days. For Doktor Fortzmann all was better under the kaiser.

The day of the countess's famous harvest party began with a driving rain that hammered down on all the ancient von Lingenfels castle's sore spots—springing leaks, dampening floors, and turning its yellow façade a slick, beetle-like black.

Even after all these years, I am not tired of reading, thinking and writing about this time and the stories people told, and did not tell themselves. I still haven't explored all its corners. I don't know everything. These days, I feel its conflicts and parables running beside us with a particular urgency, crashing over contemporary questions of immigration, religion, and climate change, swirling around our political leaders, demanding: Look at me.

For so long Marianne and Albrecht and many of their friends had known Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people’s most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country.

Years later, as a professor, Martin would try to find the words to articulate the power of togetherness in a world where togetherness had been corrupted – and to explore the effect of the music, the surprising lengths the people had gone to to hear it and to play it, as evidence that music, and art in general, are basic requirements of the human soul. Not a luxury but a compulsion.

Germany was being run by a loudmouthed rabble-rouser, bent on baiting other nations to war and making life miserable for countless innocent citizens. And here they were, drinking champagne and dancing to Scott Joplin.

And it means reasonable citizens must take action,” Connie continued. “We are not all thugs and villains. But we will become these, if we don’t try to make change.