Andreea Toader

“Then I ran to mum and demanded: 'Mum, either the piano disappears from the house or I do! Decide!' And... the piano disappeared. It was literature that I taught to Aennchen instead. In short: music disturbs! Goethe wasn’t thrilled about this either. No instruments in my house. Martha had insisted: 'But the girls, the girls, they need to learn music!' Rubbish, it’s better to read instead.”
― Bernhard Josef Maul, Mahler in Leiden - A Biographical Novel of Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud

“It was young Schneermann, Anton Schneermann, who sat at Mademoiselle Kleefeld’s table. You see, his place is empty. It will soon be filled up again, I am not worried about that—but Anton is off, on the wings of the wind, in the twinkling of an eye, rapt away before he knew where he was. Sixteen years old, and had been up here a year and a half, with six months to go. But how did it happen? Who knows? Perhaps somebody dropped a little word to Madame his mother; anyhow, she got wind of his goings-on, in Baccho et ceteris. She appears unannounced on the scene, some three heads taller than I am, white-haired and exceeding wroth; fetches Herr Anton a couple of boxes on the ear, takes him by the collar, and puts him on the train. ‘If he is going to the dogs,’ she says, ‘he can do it just as well down below.’ And off they go.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“nobody dared in those days to question such bullies, and the freedom that is more normal these days has come too late for these victims. Auden would have helped, because the whole message of his life and his poetry is the antithesis of cruelty and meanness of spirit.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

“Let’s go back to the lines at the end of “In Praise of Limestone”: “What I hear is the sound of underground streams / What I see is a limestone landscape.” Close your eyes and try to imagine the shape of these lines. I see a falling, a descent, a softening, with the gentlest of landings at the end. And I feel resolution, calmness, and forgiveness.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You