Buddenbrooks quotes

He did not come of a patrician family, and had only lately become a man of means. He could never quite get rid of certain vulgar tricks of speech—like the repetition of “I must say”; and he said “respecks” for “respects.”

“It didn’t cost anything, either,” remarked Herr Gratjens drily

—he certainly ought to have known—and studied the wall-painting through the hollow of his hand.

Well, God bless us all!

He, Friedrich Grabow, was not the man to despise a roast turkey himself.

That ham with onion sauce had been delicious, hang it! And the Plettenpudding, when they were already stuffed full—macaroons, raspberries, custard. … “A rigorous diet, Frau Consul, as I say. A little pigeon, a little French bread. …”

“What shall I say, Father? I am thoroughly taken aback.”

“You are pretty easily taken aback, then,” Johann Buddenbrook rapped out irritably

, though he knew that the reproach was far from being a just one. His son was in fact often his superior when it came to a quick decision upon the advantageous course.

The Consul went up to his rooms, and the old man felt his way along the baluster and down to the entresol. Soon the rambling old house lay wrapped in darkness and silence.

Hopes, fears, and ambitions all slumbered, while the rain fell and the autumn wind whistled around gables and street corners.

in a half mocking, half angry tone which meant: “Try it if you like. I am Consul Buddenbrook’s daughter, if you don’t know!”

Thus she went about in the town like a little queen; and like a queen, she was kind or cruel to her subjects, as the whim seized her.

The family are at table eating dessert and conversing pleasantly the while. Suddenly Christian turns pale and puts back on his plate the peach into which he has just bitten. His round, deep-set eyes, above the too-large nose, have opened wider.

“I will never eat another peach,” he says.

“Why not, Christian? What nonsense! What’s the matter?”

Directly she once says yes, she will find her place. She will have carte blanche to set herself up, and she will love her husband, after a few days. He is no beau, God knows. But he is perfectly presentable.

One mustn’t ask for five legs on a sheep, as we say in business.

If she waits for somebody to come along who is an Adonis and a good match to boot—well, God bless us, Tony Buddenbrook could always find a husband, but it’s a risk, after all.

she was one of those whom the Lord spews out of his mouth. With this phrase, which the kind Pastor Kölling adored, she encountered a piercing glance from his eyes, as he made a threatening gesture with his right arm.

Tony saw how her Father, sitting next to her, raised his hand, as though he would say, “Not so hard.”

But it was perfectly plain that either he or her Mother had let the Pastor into the secret. Tony crouched in her place with her face like fire, and felt the eyes of all the world upon her.

… dinner at the Buddenbrooks, when a course failed to come in promptly and the guests grew dull and the hostess flustered, he came to the rescue and put them into a good humour by bellowing in his big voice the whole length of the table:

“Please don’t wait for me, Frau Consul!”

Just now, in this same reverberating voice, he was relating questionable anecdotes seasoned with low-German idioms. Frau Senator Möllendorpf, in paroxysms of laughter, was crying out over and over again: “Stop, Herr Döhlmann, stop! for heaven’s sake, don’t tell any more.”

“Not a word, Morten. You can rely on me. But I don’t understand—have you all taken a vow against the nobility? What is it you want?”

“We want freedom,” Morten said.

“Yes, freedom, you know—Freedom!” he repeated;

Who knew? Perhaps she might even go on in the path prescribed for her and marry Herr Grünlich—that was a detail, after all—but when he spoke to her she could always say to herself,

“I know something you don’t: the nobility is in principle despicable.”

She smiled to herself and was assuaged. But suddenly, in the noise of the wheels, she heard Morten’s voice with miraculous clearness. She distinguished every nuance of his kindly, dragging speech as he said:

“You could go yourself, my dear.”

“Oh, if I’m marrying for the privilege of running up and down stairs⁠—!”

“Have you made up your mind yet about the material for the wedding-dress, Tony?”

“Have you made up your mind yet about the material for the wedding-dress, Tony?”

“Moiré antique, Mamma⁠—I won’t marry without moiré antique!”

So passed October and November. At Christmas time Herr Grünlich appeared, to spend Christmas in the Buddenbrook family circle and also to take part in the celebration at the Krögers’. His conduct toward his bride showed all the delicacy one would have expected from him.

“Yes, Jean, the first to leave us. Do you think she is happy with him?”

“Oh, Betsy, she is satisfied with herself, which is better; it is the most solid happiness we can have on this earth.”

They went back to their guests.

“Anton,” the Consul’s wife called with a trembling voice into the dining-room, where the servants were bustling about with the silver. “Anton! Go below! Shut the outside doors. Make everything fast. It is a mob.”

“Oh, Frau Consul,” said Anton. “Is it safe for me to do that? I am a servant. If they see my livery⁠—”

“What wicked people,” Clothilde drawled without putting down her work. Just then the Consul crossed the entrance hall and came in through the glass door. He carried his coat over his arm and his hat in his hand.

“But, Smolt, what do you want? Just tell me that, if you can.”

“Lord, Herr Consul, I say we wants a republic; that’s wat I be sayin’.”

“But, you fool, you’ve got one already.”

“Lord, Herr Consul, I say we wants a republic; that’s wat I be sayin’.”

“But, you fool, you’ve got one already.”

“Well, Herr Consul, then we wants another.”

“But, you fool, you’ve got one already.”

“Well, Herr Consul, then we wants another.”

Some of the bystanders, who understood the matter better, began to laugh rudely and heartily; and although few even heard Carl’s answer, the laughter spread until the whole crowd of republicans stood shaking good-naturedly.

Her strongly developed family sense was instinctively hostile to conceptions of free will and self-development; it inclined her rather to recognize and accept her own characteristics wholesale, with fatalistic indifference and toleration.

She had, unconsciously, the feeling that any trait of hers, no matter of what kind, was a family tradition and therefore worthy of respect.

Herr Grünlich had finished breakfast, and the fragrance of the two cigars mingled with the warm air from the stove. “Will you take another, Kesselmeyer?” said the host. “I’ll pour you out another glass of wine.—You want to see me? Anything pressing?

“That is in God’s hand, my child. It is most unfitting to speak of such things.”

Tony began at this time to use very frequently the expression “Such is life”; and with the word “life” she would open her eyes wide with a charming serious look, indicating the deep insight she had acquired into human affairs and human destinies.

Thomas returned from Pau in August of that year. The dining-table was opened out again, and Tony had a fresh audience for her tale.

Perhaps he had the idea of giving her a tip if she professed herself on the side of the Saviour.

“Lord, Herr Pastor,” said Stina, trembling and blushing, with wide eyes. “Which one do Herr Pastor mean? T’ old un or t’ young un?”

Madame Grünlich did not fail to tell the story at the table, so that even the Frau Consul burst out into her sputtering Kröger laugh. The Consul, however, looked down in displeasure at his plate.

There is such a lack of modesty in so much communicativeness. You see, Tony, anybody, except Christian, may say that he loves the theatre.

But he would say it in a different tone, more en passant, more modestly, in short.

Christian says it in a tone that says: ‘Is not my passion for the stage something very marvellous and interesting?’ He struggles, he behaves as if he were really wrestling to express something supremely delicate and difficult.”

Oh, we are travelled and educated enough to realize that the limits set to our ambition are small and petty enough, looked at from outside and above. But everything in this world is comparative, Uncle Gotthold.

Did you know one can be a great man, even in a small place; a Caesar even in a little commercial town on the Baltic?

But that takes imagination and idealism—and you didn’t have it, whatever you may have thought yourself.”

But this last was Tom’s affair, and he said nothing, while his sister now and then murmured something about people who consumed widows’ homes and made long prayers.

She hated these black gentlemen bitterly.

As a mature woman who knew life and was no longer a silly innocent, she found herself unable to believe in their irreproachable sanctity. “Mother,” she said, “oh dear, I know I must not speak evil of my neighbours.

He had not reckoned with Tony Grünlich’s skill at repartee. She was silent a moment, while her mind worked rapidly; and then out it came.

“May I ask you, Herr Pastor, to concern yourself with your own curls?”

With that she rustled out, shoulders up, head back, and chin well tucked in. Pastor Jonathan had very few curls on his head—it would be nearer truth to say that he was quite bald.

Her brother, the Consul, fetched her from the station—she had come from Buchen—and drove her through the Holsten Gate into the town. He could not resist paying her the old compliment—how, next to Clothilde, she was the prettiest one in the family; and she answered:

“Oh, Tom, I hate you! To make fun of an old lady like that⁠—”

But he was right, nevertheless: Madame Grünlich kept her good looks remarkably. You looked at the thick ash-blonde hair, rolled at the sides, drawn back above the little ears, and fastened on the top of the head with a broad tortoiseshell comb;

He put his round head with its walrus moustache on one side and blinked out of the cracks of his eyes naively as he listened to Tony’s conversation.

He looked offensively comfortable.

As he had had no experience with sprats, she daintily dismembered them for him, commenting the while on life in general.

Near the bed there was a framed text hanging on the wall, between two old copperplate views of the town in the Middle Ages. It said: “Commit your ways unto the Lord.”

But what good is a text like that when you are lying awake at midnight, and you have to decide for your whole life, and other people’s too, whether it shall be yes or no?

It was very still. The clock ticked away on the wall, and the only other sound was Mamsell Jungmann’s occasional cough. Her room was next to Tony’s, divided only by curtains from it. She still had a light.

When the Consul read these outpourings, he could never quite forego a little smile: for, nothwithstanding all the real pain they showed, he heard an undertone of almost comic pride, and he knew that

Tony Buddenbrook, as Madame Grünlich or as Madame Permaneder, was and would remain a child.

She bore all her mature experiences almost with a child’s unbelief in their reality, yet with a child’s seriousness, a child’s self-importance, and, above all, with a child’s power to throw them off at will.

I could never have dreamed, Tom, that I should be no help to you at all. Now you stand quite alone, and upon you it depends to keep up the honour and dignity of the family. May God help you in the task.”

Two large, clear, childish tears rolled down over her cheeks, which were beginning to show, very faintly, the first signs of age.

What was it, then, that he had said?

“Go to the devil, you filthy sprat-eating slut!”

And thus Tony Buddenbrook’s second marriage came to an end.

Our desires and our performance are conditioned by certain needs of our nervous systems which are very hard to define in words.

What people called Thomas Buddenbrook’s “vanity”—his care for his personal appearance, his extravagant dressing—was at bottom not vanity but something else entirely.

“

A man is as young, or as old, as he feels.

And when one gets one’s wish too late, or works too hard for it, it comes already weighted with all sorts of small vexatious drawbacks—with all the dust of reality upon it, that one did not reckon with in fancy. It is so irritating—so irritating—”

I know, from life and from history, something you have not thought of: often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in.

The outer manifestations take time⁠—like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest.

”

For as soon as something begins to slip, to relax, to get tired, within us, then everything without us will rebel and struggle to withdraw from our influence. One thing follows another, blow after blow—and the man is finished.

Often and often, in these days, I have thought of a Turkish proverb; it says, ‘When the house is finished, death comes.’

It doesn’t need to be death. But the decline, the falling-off, the beginning of the end. You know, Tony,” he went on, in a still lower voice, putting his arm underneath his sister’s, “when Hanno was christened, you said:

“

Reason is not the highest thing on earth.

”

“

Sons-in-law are always rogues,

” said Frau Permaneder, in a hollow voice.

His face, when he was alone, changed so that it was hardly recognizable. The muscles of his mouth and cheeks, otherwise obedient to his will, relaxed and became flabby.

Like a mask the look of vigour, alertness, and amiability, which now for a long time had been preserved only by constant effort, fell from his face, and betrayed an anguished weariness instead.

The tired, worried eyes gazed at objects without seeing them; they became red and watery. He made no effort to deceive even himself; and of all the dull, confused, and rambling thoughts that filled his mind he clung to only one:

Are you a little girl? What will become of you if you go on like that? Will you always be drowning yourself in tears, every time you have to speak to people?”

“I never will speak to people, never!” thought Hanno in despair.

“Think it over till this afternoon,” finished the Senator, and went into the dining-room. Ida Jungmann knelt by her fledgling and dried his eyes, and spoke to him, half consoling, half reproachful.

At school he sat heavy and hopeless, unable, despite strenuous coaching, to understand his tables. But he grasped without effort all that Herr Pfühl told him, and made it his own—if he could make more his own that which he had already owned before.

Edmund Pfühl, like a stout angel in a tailcoat, took him in his arms every Monday afternoon and transported him above all his daily misery, into the mild, sweet, grave, consoling kingdom of sound.

The lessons sometimes took place at Herr Pfühl’s own house, a roomy old gabled dwelling full of cool passages and crannies, in which the organist lived alone with an elderly housekeeper.

He understood her; that is, he understood what she said. But he could not follow her: could not comprehend why melodies which touched or stirred him were cheap and worthless, while compositions which left him cold and bewildered possessed the highest musical value.

He stood before a temple from whose threshold Gerda sternly waved him back⁠—and he watched while she and the child vanished within.

He betrayed none of his grief over this estrangement, though the gulf seemed to widen between him and his little son. The idea of suing for his child’s favour seemed frightful to him. During the day he had small time to spare;

“Do you like to go to school?”

“No,” answered Hanno, with quiet candour⁠—he did not consider it worth while to try to tell a lie in such cases.

“No? But one has to learn writing, reading, arithmetic—”

She wrote romances for the family story-papers, under a dashing pseudonym. The story was told of Count Eberhard that when he first withdrew to his little farm, he devised a means of protecting himself from the importunities of peddlers, beggars, and busybodies.

He put up a sign which read: “Here lives Count Mölln. He wants nothing, buys nothing, and gives nothing away.”

When the sign had served its purpose, he removed it.

And little Johann stammered, retreating, with his hand to his cheek,

“I thought⁠—I thought⁠—there was nothing else coming.”

“You nearly forgot—” his mother repeated, and stiffened.

“Yes, I really forgot it was Christmas. I was reading a book of travel, about South America.⁠—Dear me, I’ve seen such a lot of Christmases!”

he added, and was about to launch out upon a description of a Christmas in a fifth-rate variety theatre in London—when all at once the church-like hush of the room began to work upon him, and he moved on tiptoe to his place, wrinkling up …

Frau Permaneder was going along Broad Street in a great hurry. There was something abandoned about her air: she showed almost none of the impressive bearing usual to her on the street.

Hunted and harassed, in almost violent haste, she had as it were been able to save only a remnant of her dignity⁠—like a beaten king who gathers what is left of his army about him to seek safety in the arms of flight.

She looked pitiable indeed. Her upper lip, that arched upper lip that had always done its share to give charm to her face, was quivering now, and the eyes were large with apprehension.

She sobbed once or twice before she answered, hopelessly: “Oh, no, Tom. How could I? I’ve seen so much evil in the world. I haven’t believed in it from the beginning, even, though I tried my very best.

Life makes it so very hard, you know, to believe in anyone’s innocence.

Oh, no—I’ve had doubts of his good conscience for a long time, and Erica has not known what to make of him—she confessed it to me, with tears—on account of his behaviour at home. We haven’t talked about it, of course.

Yes, you are without pity, without love, without humility.—Oh,” he cried, and stretched both arms in front of him, palms outward, as though pushing everything away from him,

“Oh, how sick I am of all this tact and propriety, this poise and refinement⁠—sick to death of it!”

The outburst was so genuine, so heartfelt, it sounded so full of loathing and satiety, that it was actually crushing. Thomas shrank a little and looked down in front of him, weary and without a word.

They would go with him to his grave.—But were ideals, after all, meant to be realized? No, a thousand times no! We might long for the stars, but should we ever reach them?

No, hope, not realization, was the most beautiful thing in life

: “L’espérance, tout trompeuse qu’elle est, sert au moins à nous mener à la fin de la vie par un chemin agréable.” La Rochefoucauld said that, and it was fine, wasn’t it?

She put back her head like a bird beginning to sing, pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, uttered a wail of mingled protest and lament, and, giving no heed to the passersby or to the remonstrances of her daughter, gave her tears free vent.

They were the unashamed, refreshing tears of her childhood, which she still retained despite all the storms and shipwrecks of her life.

He had, indeed, known how to make his position and his power mean more than others had made them mean in his place: even his enemies did not deny that he was “the Burgomaster’s right hand.” But Burgomaster himself Thomas Buddenbrook could never become.

He was a merchant, not a professional man; he had not taken the classical course at the gymnasium, he was not a lawyer.

He had always done a great deal of historical and literary reading in his spare time, and he was conscious of being superior to his circle in mind and understanding, in inward as well as outward culture;

He, who had once so hated all smallness and pettiness, was developing a pedantry which seemed to him the outgrowth of anybody else’s character rather than his own.

He was empty within.

There was no stimulus, no absorbing task into which he could throw himself.

And, in truth,

Thomas Buddenbrook’s existence was no different from that of an actor⁠—an actor whose whole life has become one long production, which, but for a few brief hours for relaxation, consumes him unceasingly.

In the absence of any ardent objective interest, his inward impoverishment oppressed him almost without any relief, with a constant, dull chagrin;

“With a revolver?” he asked, after silence had reigned some two minutes. And then, after another pause, he said in a low voice, slowly and mockingly:

“That is the nobility for you!”

Then he fell again to musing, and the rapidity with which he drew the ends of his moustaches through his fingers was in remarkable contrast to the vacant fixity of his gaze.

the instincts of the thrifty merchant against the frivolous, adventurous, unreliable military caste. He called Herr von Throta “the lieutenant,” and tried to think of him as that; but in his heart he was conscious that the name was inappropriate.

What was it that Thomas Buddenbrook feared? Nothing⁠—nothing to put a name to.

If there had only been something tangible, some simple, brutal fact, something to defend himself against! He envied people the simplicity of their conceptions.

God knows how much he understood. But one thing they both felt: in the long second when their eyes met, all constraint, coldness, and misunderstanding melted away. Hanno might fail his father in all that demanded vitality, energy and strength.

But where fear and suffering were in question, there Thomas Buddenbrook could count on the devotion of his son.

On that common ground they met as one.

What was Death? The answer came, not in poor, large-sounding words: he felt it within him, he possessed it.

Death was a joy, so great, so deep that it could be dreamed of only in moments of revelation like the present.

It was the return from an unspeakably painful wandering, the correction of a grave mistake, the loosening of chains, the opening of doors—it put right again a lamentable mischance.

End, dissolution! These were pitiable words, and thrice pitiable he who used them! What would end, what would dissolve? Why, this his body, this heavy, faulty, hateful incumbrance, which prevented him from being something other and better.

Was not every human being a mistake and a blunder?

Was he not in painful arrest from the hour of his birth? Prison, prison, bonds and limitations everywhere!

“And Strunck and Hagenström have all the business in their hands anyhow,” the broker said morosely, with his elbows sprawled out on the table and his wicked old grey head in his hands.

“Oh, nothing can compete with a dung-heap, for smell,”

Döhlmann said, with a deliberately coarse pronunciation, which must have depressed everybody’s spirits the more by its hopeless cynicism. “Well, and you, Buddenbrook—what are you doing now? Nothing, eh?”

Her digestion was not perfect, it is true. But her heart—ah, her heart was light, her spirit was free; freer than she herself comprehended.

She was not consumed by the inexpressible.

No sorrow weighed her down, or strove to speak but could not. And thus it was that her past left no mark upon her.

but the eyes that rest on the wide ocean and are soothed by the sight of its waves rolling on forever, mystically, relentlessly, are those that are already wearied by looking too deep into the solemn perplexities of life.—

Health and illness, that is the difference.

The man whose strength is unexhausted climbs boldly up into the lofty multiplicity of the mountain heights.

But it is when one is worn out with turning one’s eyes inward upon the bewildering complexity of the human heart, that one finds peace in resting them on the wideness of the sea.”

Frau Permaneder was silent and uncomfortable⁠—as simple people are when a profound truth is suddenly expressed in the middle of a conventional conversation.

People don’t say such things, she thought to herself; and looked out to sea so as not to show her feeling by meeting his eyes.

Never in his life had Thomas Buddenbrook so impressed his brother as at this hour.

Success is so definite, so conclusive! Death alone can make others respect our sufferings; and through death the most pitiable sufferings acquire dignity.

“You have won—I give in,” Christian thought. He knelt on one knee, with a sudden awkward gesture, and kissed the cold hand on the coverlet. Then he stepped back and moved about the room, his eyes darting back and forth.

Here he lay, at whom once Christian had flung the reproach that he was too heartless to weep at a brother’s death. He was dead now himself: he had simply withdrawn, silent, elegant, and irreproachable, into the hereafter.

He had, as so often in his life, left it to others to feel put in the wrong.

No matter now, whether he had been right or wrong in his cold and scornful indifference toward his brother’s afflictions, the “misery,” the nodding man, the spirit-bottle, the open window. None of that mattered now;

Frau Permaneder scratched busily. But regularly once every five minutes she would put down her pen, lift her clasped hands up to her mouth, and break out in lamentations.

“I can’t realize it!” she would cry⁠—meaning that she was gradually beginning to realize.

“It is the end of everything,” she burst out another time, in sheer despair, and flung her arms around her sister-in-law’s neck with loud weeping. After each outburst she was strengthened, and took up her work again.

Senator Buddenbrook had died of a bad tooth. So it was said in the town. But goodness, people don’t die of a bad tooth!

He had had a toothache; Herr Brecht had broken off the crown; and thereupon the Senator had simply fallen in the street. Was ever the like heard?

Now everything was out of the way and done with—for he had obstinately put off his preparation for Monday until after the opera. What was Monday to him? Was it likely it would ever dawn?

Who believes in Monday, when he is to hear Lohengrin on Sunday evening?

He would get up early on Monday and get the wretched stuff done—and that was all there was to it. Thus he went about free from care, fondled the coming joy in his heart, dreamed at his piano, and forgot all unpleasantness to come.

And he had been overpowered by an attack of the complete despondency which was all too familiar an experience.

Again he had learned that beauty can pierce one like a pain, and that it can sink profoundly into shame and a longing despair that utterly consume the courage and energy necessary to the life of every day.

His despondency weighed him down like mountains, and once more he told himself, as he had done before, that this was more than his own individual burden of weaknesses that rested upon him:

And yet he continued to lie, full of exasperation and rebellion against this brutal compulsion that was upon him to forsake his warm bed in the frosty dawning and go out into the world, into contact with harsh and unfriendly people.

“Oh, only two little tiny minutes more,” he begged of his pillow, in overwhelming tenderness.

And then he gave himself a full five minutes more, out of sheer bravado, and closed his eyes, opening one from time to time to stare despairingly at the clock, which went stupidly on in its insensate, accurate way.

There was something positively repulsive about Wasservogel; but Herr Ballerstedt gave him a large meed of praise.

Wasservogel had the knack of making the masters like him; and they praised him in order to show that they were incapable of being led away by his ugliness to blame him unjustly.

The lesson continued. Various pupils were called up to display their knowledge touching Job, the man from the land of Uz. Gottlob Kassbaum, son of the unfortunate merchant P.