W. G. Sebald Quotes

Quotes about:

• It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

  W. G. Sebald

  Reading, Evening, Thanks

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “Vertigo”, p.62, New Directions Publishing

  58 Copy quote

• We all have appointments with the past.

  W. G. Sebald

  Military, Past, Appointments

  16 Copy quote

• We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.

  W. G. Sebald

  Rabbits, Experiments

  21 Copy quote

• I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

  W. G. Sebald

  Dream, Reality, Lakes

  29 Copy quote

• How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?

  W. G. Sebald

  Cases

  W.G. Sebald (2011). “The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald”, p.133, Seven Stories Press

  6 Copy quote

• We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

  W. G. Sebald

  Steps, Conscious, Results

  W. G. Sebald (2013). “Austerlitz”, p.99, Penguin UK

  33 Copy quote

• One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.

  W. G. Sebald

  Memories, Despair, Littles

  22 Copy quote

• The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

  W. G. Sebald

  Past, Way, Normal

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “Vertigo”, p.106, New Directions Publishing

  9 Copy quote

• In my photographic work I was always especially entranced... by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them.

  W. G. Sebald

  Memories, Night, Reality

  W.G. Sebald (2014). “Austerlitz”, p.96, Vintage Canada

  20 Copy quote

• 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.

  W. G. Sebald

  Civilization, Growing, Strange

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “The Rings of Saturn”, p.101, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.

  W. G. Sebald

  Book, Twilight, Dark

  W.G. Sebald (2014). “Austerlitz”, p.140, Vintage Canada

  33 Copy quote

• No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.

  W. G. Sebald

  Mother, Light, Boston

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “The Rings of Saturn”, p.57, New Directions Publishing

  29 Copy quote

• 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.

  W. G. Sebald

  Memories, Happy Life, Mind

  11 Copy quote

• Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

  W. G. Sebald

  Past, Layers, Emotion

  7 Copy quote

• This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.

  W. G. Sebald

  Perspective, Survivor, Falsification

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “The Rings of Saturn”, p.70, New Directions Publishing

  17 Copy quote

• Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

  W. G. Sebald

  Home, Humanity, Abstract

  7 Copy quote

• No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.

  W. G. Sebald

  Doors, Childhood, Terror

  W.G. Sebald (2014). “Austerlitz”, p.46, Vintage Canada

  5 Copy quote

• Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

  W. G. Sebald

  Funny, Animal, Men

  "The Greatest Human-Animal Relationships in Cinema" by Tony Hinds, thefilmstage.com. June 23, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

• At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

  W. G. Sebald

  Eye, Shadow, Ruins

  W. G. Sebald (2013). “Austerlitz”, p.30, Penguin UK

  12 Copy quote

• I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all... only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry[the geometric measurement of solid bodies], between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.

  W. G. Sebald

  Moving, Eye, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  W. G. Sebald

  Believe, Black And White, Life And Death

  13 Copy quote

• By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

  W. G. Sebald

  Mean, Reader, Experiments

  22 Copy quote

• There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.

  W. G. Sebald

  Cities, Numbers, Telephones

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “Vertigo”, p.20, New Directions Publishing

  5 Copy quote

• It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.

  W. G. Sebald

  Space, House, Waiting

  W. G. Sebald (2013). “Austerlitz”, p.158, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  W. G. Sebald

  Believe, Heart, World

  W. G. Sebald (2016). “The Rings of Saturn”, p.51, New Directions Publishing

  21 Copy quote

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