W.G. Sebald Quotes
We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.
We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.
The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.
Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.
No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.
There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.
Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.
A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.
A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom
I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind.
Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.
However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.
Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.
At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.
At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms. But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do!