“Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.”

—  Thomas Mann , book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

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Thomas Mann 159
German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate 1875–1955

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