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Thomas Mann

“Nothing is more bizarre, more ticklish, than a relationship between two people who know each other only with their eyes—who encounter, observe each other daily, even hourly, never greeting, never speaking, constrained by convention or by caprice to keep acting the indifferent strangers. They experience discomfort and overwrought curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally stifled need to recognize and to exchange, and they especially feel something like a tense mutual esteem. For people love and honor someone so long as they cannot judge him, and yearning is a product of defective knowledge.”

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
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Death in Venice Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
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