“Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being… — 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 Image
“...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 of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier, seventy-two years later. And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back… — 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 Image
“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 Image
“In this little booklet, which had belonged to a maternal great-uncle of ... mine, who spent some time working as an office clerk in northern Italy towards the end of the last century, everything seemed arranged in the best of all possible ways, quite as though the world was made up purely of letters and words and as if, through… — 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 Image
“...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 Image
“Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out… — 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 Image
“Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced - consciousness - and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that… — 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 Image
“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 Image
