Golden Age quotes

Question 1

‘left behind their family and friends’

Answer 1

Refers to the effects of the war on the Gold family.

Question 2

‘her escape’

Answer 2

Refers to Ida’s love of piano and the way it helps her eventually become comfortable in her new home in Australia, upon finding a new audience to appreciate her vocation.

Question 3

‘failure, powerlessness that he had not protected his boy’

Answer 3

Shows how caring Meyer is toward his family as well as the detrimental effects that polio caused to parents and families.

Question 4

‘Frank loved him intensely’

Answer 4

This is about Meyer and their relationship

Question 5

‘extraordinary’

Answer 5

How Meyer describes Olive Penny

Question 6

‘return to a certain lightness’

Answer 6

Meyer after meeting Olive

Question 7

‘vibrant with life’

Answer 7

Describing Olive Penny

Question 8

‘desperate to be normal’

Answer 8

Frank after contracting polio

Question 9

‘wanted to get straight back onto the ship’

Answer 9

Ida after arriving in Australia

Question 10

‘should never have come’

Answer 10

Ida’s feelings about Australia

Question 11

‘the lucky ones’

Answer 11

Meyer talking about Frank and Elsa

Question 12

‘almost a relief when they went home’

Answer 12

Felt when parents left TGA, due to their isolation from their family

Question 13

‘an orchard of peace and light’

Answer 13

describing the Golden Age

Question 14

‘didn’t even feel like Elizabeth Anne’s mother’

Answer 14

Olive about motherhood

Question 15

‘how to live here’

Answer 15

Meyer to Olive at the end of the novel before they part forever

Question 16

‘shame’ ‘burden’

Answer 16

feelings associated with polio

Question 17

‘he felt stronger’

Answer 17

Frank finding his vocation

Question 18

‘his future had been restored to him’

Answer 18

Frank about poetry

Question 19

‘little maimed animals’

Answer 19

How Frank felt when first arriving

Question 20

‘beginning of himself’`

Answer 20

Franks time with Ida’s teachers during the war

Question 21

‘tactless’ ‘cruelly ironic’

Answer 21

The Golden Age name

Question 22

‘Something had been taken away from him in the war, against his will, and he would never be the same.’

Answer 22

Meyer after his time in the camps

Question 23

‘Margaret had learnt to press on’

Answer 23

in her society where she is outcast

Question 24

‘Her daughter would outgrow her’

Answer 24

Margaret

Question 25

‘all his poems have been messages to her’

Answer 25

Frank’s poems are for Elsa many decades after their seperation

Question 26

‘buried in the earth which (he) had come to love’

Answer 26

Meyer

Question 27

‘She felt like an outcast’

Answer 27

Margaret

Question 28

‘were impaired as no one could ever wish a child to be’

Answer 28

polio

Question 29

‘Elsa, who made him think of an angel’

Answer 29

Frank

Question 30

‘to love a place, to imagine yourself belonging to it, was a lie, a fiction.’

Answer 30

Meyer’s view after the war

Question 31

‘starting to see it differently, to look a little kindly upon it’

Answer 31

Meyer after his first meeting with olive penny

Question 32

‘there was a call between them’

Answer 32

Meyer and Olive

Question 33

‘some people walked out’

Answer 33

of the butcher’s when Margaret walked in

Question 34

‘Elsa was the compensation for everything’

Answer 34

to Margaret

Question 35

‘She was his homing point, the place he returned to. His escape, his refuge.’

Answer 35

elsa

Question 36

‘Sometimes they just hung around and stared’

Answer 36

kids in front of the golden age

Question 37

‘damaged creatures who could not move unaided’

Answer 37

the children

Question 38

‘their success or failure in overcoming polio was up to them’

Answer 38

realisation after the death of Lidja

Question 39

‘This was the land in which her life would take place. In which her music must grow. This was her audience.’

Answer 39

Ida after the Queen’s concert

Question 40

‘an incongrously beautiful woman’

Answer 40

Meyer’s thoughts of Olive Penny