Dmitrii Lut

“Was not every human being a mistake, a blunder? Did we not, at the very moment of birth, stumble into agonizing captivity? A prison, a prison with bars and chains everywhere! And, staring out hopelessly from between the bars of his individuality, a man sees only the surrounding walls of external circumstance, until death comes and calls him home to freedom.

Individuality! Oh, what a man is, can, and has seems to him so poor, gray, inadequate, and boring. But what a man is not, cannot, and does not have—he gazes at all that with longing envy—envy that turns to love, because he fears it will turn to hate.”
― Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

“What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back and see it was full of treasures.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Miracles

“That time will have come when our prison, which though extensive is nonetheless cramped and filled with suffocatingly stale air, has opened-that is, when the war raging at present has come to an end, one way or the other. And how that "or the other" sets me in terror of both myself and the awful straits into which fate has squeezed the German heart! For in fact I have only "the other" in mind; I am relying on it, counting solely on it, against my conscience as a citizen. After all, never-failing public indoctrination has made sure that we are profoundly aware of the crushing consequences, in all their irrevocable horror, of a German defeat, so that we cannot help fearing it more than anything else in the world. And yet there is something that some of us fear-at certain moments that seem criminal even to ourselves, whereas others fear it quite frankly and permanently-fear more than a German defeat, and that is a German victory. I hardly dare ask myself to which of these two persuasions I belong. Perhaps to a third, in which one yearns for defeat constantly and consciously, but with unrelenting agony of conscience.”
― Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

“What is success? A mysterious, indescribable power—a vigilance, a readiness, the awareness that simply by my presence I can exert pressure on the movements of life around me, the belief that life can be molded to my advantage.”
― Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks