Late evening, after the social gathering, when the crowd had left, was his best time. Then he would stay behind alone in the salon or stealthily return to play music until well into the night. It turned out he had less reason to fear disturbing the peace than he had first thought, for he found that his ghostly music carried only over a limited range. The vibrations produced amazing effects near their source, but like all ghostly things, quickly languished with distance, grew feeble, their powers merely illusory. Within these four walls, Hans Castorp was alone with the wonders of his apparatus - with the lush achievements of this little truncated coffin of fiddlewood, this small, dull-black temple with its doors flung wide, before which he would sit in an armchair, hands folded, head on one shoulder, mouth open, letting the fullness of harmony spill over him.

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

It appears you are incorrigible. I will tell you straight out: you are a subtle young man. I don’t know whether you have any depth, but you definitely have subtlety.

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

His form is logic, but his nature is confusion.

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

When the last flickering frame of one reel had twitched out of sight, and the lights went up in the hall and the audience’s field of dreams stood before them like an empty blackboard, there was not even the possibility of applause. There was no one there to clap for, to thank, no artistic achievement to reward with a curtain call. The actors who had been cast in the play they had just seen had long since been scattered to the winds; they had watched only phantoms, whose deeds had been reduced to a million photographs brought into focus for the briefest of moments so that, as often as one liked, they could be given back to the element of time as a series of blinking flashes. Once the illusion was over, there was something repulsive about the crowd’s nervous silence. Hands lay impotent before the void. People rubbed their eyes, stared straight ahead, felt embarrassed by the brightness and demanded the return of the dark, so that they could again watch things, whose time had passed, come to pass again, tricked out with music and transplanted into new time.

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike center, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core. This was not merely a metaphor- any more than it would be to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells”. A city, a state, a social community organized around the division of labor was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it.

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

All the same, it seemed to him that they were hurrying things, talking about Christmas even before the first day of Advent - it was still a good six weeks away. But people leaped right over those six weeks, devoured them there in the dining hall - a mental procedure that Hans Castorp had learned something about all on his own, although he was not yet used to practicing it with the cool grace of some of the old-timers among his fellow patients. Such junctures in the course of a year seemed to give them a hook to hang on to, functioned like a piece of gymnastic equipment for vaulting nimbly over the empty intervals in between. They were all feverish, with accelerated metabolisms, the whole physical organism working at a faster, augmented pace, which may well have had something to do with the way they drove time like a herd before them.

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Permit me, permit me, my good engineer, to tell you something, to lay it upon your heart. The only healthy and noble and indeed, let me expressly point out, the only religious way in which to regard death is to perceive and feel it as a constituent part of life, as life’s holy prerequisite, and not to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or worse, to play it against life in some disgusting fashion…

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Space, as it rolls and tumbles away between him and his native soil, proves to have powers normally ascribed only to time; from hour to hour space brings about changes very like those time produces, yet surpassing them in certain ways. Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state - indeed, in but a moment it can turn a pedant and a philistine into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

In response to much begging, he was kind enough to allow his patient to view his own hand through the fluoroscope. And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness - and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him: a hard thing, this ore with which man adorns a body predestined to melt away beneath it, so that it can be free again and move on to yet other flesh that may bear it for a while.

~Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

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