Quotes from book
Tristan

Name: Tristan
Author: Thomas Mann

Thomas MannOriginal title Tristan (German, 1903)

Tristan is a 1903 novella by German writer Thomas Mann. It contains many references to the myth of Tristan and Iseult. The novella alludes in particular to the version presented in Richard Wagner's opera of the same name. As such, it can be seen as an ironic paraphrase, juxtaposing the romantic heroism of Wagner's characters with their essentially flawed counterparts in the novella. It also heavily deals with psychology and a major part of the novel is set in a sanatorium and details the lives of two people who are patients at the sanatorium.

“They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night’s magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!”

Thomas Mann book Tristan

Source: Tristan (1902), Ch. 8

“It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.”

Thomas Mann book Tristan

Source: Tristan (1902), Ch. 7

“It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction.”

Thomas Mann book Tristan

Source: Tristan (1902), Ch. 10
Context: It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.