Vusch · Story

About the Quote I Never Found

Roger Nitzsche · Basel, June 2026

I admit it: I belong to those people who buy notebooks because they're beautiful. Not because I have so much to write down. Bider & Tanner on Spalenberg is dangerous in that respect. You walk in for a postcard and walk out with a Leuchtturm-Moleskine and a vague sense of literary productivity.

Four of them were on my desk back then. A black one in the backpack. On the iPhone a Notes-app file simply called „Book" — which is about as precise as a signpost reading „over there." Somewhere among them slept a sentence from Klara and the Sun. Something about attention. Something about love. The word „perhaps" was definitely in there. I had written it down, I knew that. I just couldn't find it.

It was mid-January, the third day of rain in a row, I was sitting at Cream Cakery on Spalenberg, the espresso was already gone, and I had been searching for half an hour. Then I opened the App Store. „Book journal." Goodreads — owned by Amazon, no thanks. Three subscription apps, one wanted to share my reading progress on Facebook. One hadn't seen an update since 2019 and looked the part.

I put the iPhone away. Ordered a second espresso.

There's this moment a reasonable person should probably avoid: when you stop searching and start thinking, I'll build it myself. Not a good thought. But on that rainy day, with a second espresso in front of me, it was the only one that felt right. Probably similar to how someone, one morning, decides to walk to Santiago de Compostela.

A year and a half later, Vusch is in the Swiss App Store.

An iOS app for serious readers. Scan books, write your thoughts in. Apple Intelligence processes everything locally on the iPhone — not somewhere in a cloud you never see and have to trust. Three Swiss bookshops linked. All four national languages plus English — including Romansh, the fourth national tongue that simply doesn't exist in most apps. No subscription. CHF 15 once. You buy it. You have it. Done.

The sentence from Klara and the Sun, by the way, I never found again. But since Vusch exists, that doesn't happen to me anymore. When I find a sentence important today, I type it in. It's then where the book is. Next to the cover. Next to the date. And the next time I sit at Cream Cakery with a rainy day and an espresso, I know where my sentences are.

Vusch means „voice" in Romansh. Some words have to sound first before you understand what they mean.