“How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin — a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!”

— Thomas Mann , book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 3, 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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Thomas Mann 159

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