W.G. Sebald Quotes

#1. Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I would probably have waited more patiently.

W.G. Sebald

#2. 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

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

W.G. Sebald

#4. By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

W.G. Sebald

#5. The current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.

W.G. Sebald

#6. Dr K. relishes the pleasures (but only, as he notes himself, the pleasures) of being declassed.

W.G. Sebald

#7. Our concern with history ... is a concern with preformed images already imprinted in our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.

W.G. Sebald

#8. And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

W.G. Sebald

#9. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.

W.G. Sebald

#10. It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other.

W.G. Sebald

#11. Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

W.G. Sebald

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

W.G. Sebald

#13. 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.

W.G. Sebald

#14. 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.

W.G. Sebald

#15. How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.

W.G. Sebald

#16. 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

#17. Madame Gherardi maintained that love, like most other blessings of civilisation, was a chimaera which we desire the more, the further removed we are from Nature.

W.G. Sebald

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say.

W.G. Sebald

#21. The population decided - out of sheer panic at first - to carry on as if nothing had happened.
- Air War and Literature: The Zurich Lectures

W.G. Sebald

#22. Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.

W.G. Sebald

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

W.G. Sebald

#24. Looking back, you might say that Ambros Adelwarth the private man had ceased to exist, that nothing was left but his shell of decorum.

W.G. Sebald

#25. I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

W.G. Sebald

#26. We all have appointments with the past.

W.G. Sebald

#27. How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?

W.G. Sebald

#28. In the house of shadows where the legend rises the deciphering begins

W.G. Sebald

#29. To this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in traveling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad.

W.G. Sebald

#30. It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyze my entire system.

W.G. Sebald

#31. In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.

W.G. Sebald

#32. Beyle's advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one's travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completly, ideed one might say they destroy them.

W.G. Sebald

#33. I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind ...

W.G. Sebald

#34. From the earliest times, 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 when fade away.

W.G. Sebald

#35. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

W.G. Sebald

#36. I have even begun to speak in foreign tongues roaming like a nomad in my own town.

W.G. Sebald

#37. It is hard, said Mme Landau, when I told her about those railway lessons, in the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of. Yes, it is very hard, said Mme Landau, one really doesn't know.

W.G. Sebald

#38. Because (in principle) things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experiences they have had with us inside them and are - in fact- the book of our history opened before us.

W.G. Sebald

#39. I don't want to talk about my trials and tribulations. Once you reveal even part of what your real problems might be in life, they come back in a deformed way.

W.G. Sebald

#40. 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

#41. It just takes one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes

W.G. Sebald

#42. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

W.G. Sebald

#43. A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom

W.G. Sebald

#44. 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

#45. What distinguishes art from such undertaker's business is that life's closeness to death is its theme, not its addiction.

W.G. Sebald

#46. 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!

W.G. Sebald

#47. You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.

W.G. Sebald

#48. All things, my son, transmute
into old age, life diminishes,
everything declines,
the proliferation/ of kinds is a mere
illusion, and no one
knows to what end.

W.G. Sebald

#49. 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.

W.G. Sebald

#50. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.

W.G. Sebald

#51. It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself , either in your first or second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

W.G. Sebald

#52. 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

#53. To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace?

W.G. Sebald

#54. And once he said do not forget
the north wind brings
light from the house of Aries
to the apple trees

W.G. Sebald

#55. 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

#56. The seasons and the years came and went ... and always ... one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.

W.G. Sebald

#57. Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

W.G. Sebald

#58. A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.

W.G. Sebald

#59. At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.

W.G. Sebald

#60. Where I grew up, in a remote village at the back of a valley, the old still thought the dead needed attending to - a notion so universal, it's enscribed in all religions. If you didn't, they might exact revenge upon the living.

W.G. Sebald

#61. Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

W.G. Sebald

#62. How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.

W.G. Sebald

#63. Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

W.G. Sebald

#64. I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him.

W.G. Sebald

#65. A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.

W.G. Sebald

#66. 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

#67. Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of a dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds

W.G. Sebald

#68. People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time.

W.G. Sebald

#69. 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

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

W.G. Sebald

#71. From the outset my main concern was with the shape and the self-contained nature of discrete things, the curve of banisters on a staircase, the molding of a stone arch over a gateway, the tangled precision of the blades in a tussock of dried grass.

W.G. Sebald

#72. To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder.

W.G. Sebald

#73. 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.

W.G. Sebald

#74. Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

W.G. Sebald

#75. I was counting the blades of grass, he said, by way of apology for his absentmindedness. It's a sort of pastime of mine. Rather irritating, I'm afraid.

W.G. Sebald

#76. I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller.

W.G. Sebald

#77. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down.

W.G. Sebald

#78. The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

W.G. Sebald