Joseph in Egypt Quotes

“God does all, yet has given us a conscience, and we become guilty before Him because we are guilty for Him. Man bears God’s guilt; and it would be no more than right if one day God were to make up His mind to bear our guilt. How He, the holy and blameless, could do that is hard to say. I should think He would need to become a man to that end.”
― Thomas Mann, Joseph in Egypt

“Always there had been contacts between that sphere and Joseph’s present one; for the darkly beautiful Ishmael had taken to wife a daughter of the black earth, and from the marriage the half-Egyptian Ishmaelites had sprung, called and chosen to bring Joseph down hitherwards. And many like them traded between the rivers to and fro, and apron-skirted messengers had gone about, a thousand years and more, with letters written on bricks carried within their garments’ folds. But if this Naphtali-nature had always been, yet now in Joseph’s time it was as never before a regular, customary, and developed thing; for the land whither he was snatched and where he lived his second life was definitely a land of descendants: no longer piously self-sufficient and strict as Amun would have it be, but worldly and seeking the pleasures of the world; so that if a Come-hither Asiatic lad had but a cunning gift at saying good-night and could add two and two, he could become the body-servant to a great Egyptian and goodness knows what besides!”
― Thomas Mann, Joseph in Egypt

“For to conceive the sum of Joseph’s efforts for master and steward one must add that he had every evening to say good-night to Mont-kaw, and every night in different phrases. For that service he had originally been bought; and Mont-kaw had been too favourably impressed with the first instance to forgo the pleasure in the sequel. He was a poor sleeper, as the pouches under his eyes betrayed. Only hardly did the overburdened brain relax from the occupations of the day and find the good highway to slumber. The kidneys too were bad and helped to make the transit difficult. So that he could well use a few sweet words and mellifluous murmurings at the end of the day. Thus Joseph might never neglect to come before him at night and drop soothing speech in his ears—which, besides everything else, had to be prepared during the day, for it must have comeliness of form.”
― Thomas Mann, Joseph in Egypt

“If to be dead and perished means to be quite inseparably bound to a state which permits no looking back, no gesture, no smallest resumption of relations with his previous life; if it means to be vanished speechless from that former life without leave or thinkable possibility of breaking the silence with any whatsoever sign—then Joseph was dead; and the oil with which he might anoint himself after cleansing from the dust of the grave had been no other than that which one gives the dead into the grave for his anointing in another life.”
― Thomas Mann, Joseph in Egypt

“The servants’ bare soles were inaudible on the matted floors, and the speech of Petepre and his kin was infrequent and soft-voiced from mutual respect. They bent tactfully toward each other, and in the pauses between courses held to each other’s noses a lotus flower, or some dainty morsel to each other’s mouths. Their mutual gentleness was exquisite, it was almost painful.”
― Thomas Mann, Joseph in Egypt