“Anthropological theory assumes that exposure in a treeless situation where all escape upwards was cut off led to the invention of myths. Kafka's ape, dragged into human society, expresses very similar ideas in his 'Report for an Academy'. It is… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share Image
“The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance,… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“...I was just laying aside a Lausanne paper I'd bought in Zurich when my eye was caught by a report that said the remains… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“Is the destruction not, rather, irrefutable proof that the catastrophes which develop, so to speak, in our hands and seem to break out suddenly… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn't any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“In this little booklet, which had belonged to a maternal great-uncle of ... mine, who spent some time working as an office clerk in… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“It is hard, said Mme Landau, when I told her about those railway lessons, in the end it is hard to know what it… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“...I remembered the story Evan the cobbler had told me, about the two headstreams of Dwy Fawr and Dwy Fach which are said to… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“What distinguishes art from such undertaker's business is that life's closeness to death is its theme, not its addiction.” — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“I have even begun to speak in foreign tongues roaming like a nomad in my own town.” — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“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,… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“But I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul.” — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“Like our bodies and our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
“I remember to this day how easily I could grasp what he called his tentative ideas when he talked about the architectural style of… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share
