Top 21 Aschenbach Quotes
#1. Aschenbach stated outright that nearly everything great owes its existence to "despites": despite misery
Thomas Mann
#2. To my mind, Death in Venice represents an enormous advance in Mann's literary development, not simply for the commonly appreciated reason that he crafted a superbly supple and elegant style, apparently well suited to the kind of prose Aschenbach is supposed to write.
Philip Kitcher
#3. We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to think about ways of developing further the Aschenbach-Mahler connection.
Philip Kitcher
#4. Using the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth is one of the touches of pure genius in Visconti's film (even though Mahlerians complain very loudly that the piece has been ruined), since it corresponds perfectly to Aschenbach's yearnings and to his circling walks around Venice.
Philip Kitcher
#5. Mann's Death in Venice actually contains a snippet of philosophy about the second question, when Aschenbach, collapsed in the plaza, engages in his quasi-Socratic, anti-Socratic, ruminations.
Philip Kitcher
#6. I read Aschenbach's constant desire to go beyond the works he has already produced to be the counterpart of Mann's deep wish to surpass his previous fiction; sometimes the diaries express this in terms of a dejected judgment that the summit has already been reached.
Philip Kitcher
#7. Mann's sexuality and his attitudes towards it are extremely complex - and the complexities are inherited in the figure of Aschenbach. Mann had lived through a series of (almost certainly unconsummated) relationships with young men.
Philip Kitcher
#8. Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.
Philip Kitcher
#9. I suggest in my own discussion of this episode, Mann invites us to set the attempt to philosophize about his predicament in the context of Aschenbach's life. The literary presentation thus adds to the naked philosophical skeleton.
Philip Kitcher
#10. Aschenbach is not only a projection of Mann in the obvious ways - same daily routines, author of the works Mann had planned - nor even in sharing his author's aspirations, doubts, and sexual identity. His watchword, "Durchhalten!" [persevere, keep going] could be Mann's own.
Philip Kitcher
#11. The classical allusions and the Platonic disquisitions on beauty are no longer a form of cover, but integral to Aschenbach's complex sexuality. Moreover, the wandering around Venice in pursuit of Tadzio isn't a prelude to some sexual contact for which Aschenbach is yearning.
Philip Kitcher
#12. Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me -
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in
Sappho
#13. It had to be the most surreal, embarrassing, awkward moment of his life, standing petrified in his mother's backyard in front of a broken lawn mower, sporting a woody and discussing sex for sale with the landlady.
Linda Kage
#14. I'm not a terrible person, I know that, but sometimes in a relationship, I can be crappy.
Kris Allen
#16. To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. 4
Susan Sontag
#17. We've advanced in the construction of a true free-trade area across South America ... What's needed now is less rhetoric and more action.
Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva
#18. An educated man should know everything about something and something about everything
C.V. Wedgwood
#19. You need a really solid foundation of friends and family to keep you where you need to be.
Lilly Singh
#20. For lo? my words no fancied woes relate; I speak from science and the voice of fate.
Homer
