“Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.”

—  Thomas Mann , book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 7
Context: Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.

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

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