All W G Sebald Quotes
- 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… Backbone
- We all have appointments with the past. All
- At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory. Believe
- 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
- We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it. Experiment
- 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… Abstract
- 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… All
- 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… All
- 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… Absurd
- 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… Artificial
- And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are… Bones
- And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. Dead
- 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… Been
- 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… Always Kept
- Everything our civilization has produced is entombed. Civilization
- Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. Across
- 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… Access
- A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy. Collection
- The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors… Anything Else
- 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… According
- A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom Established
- By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment All
- 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,… Amassed
- Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. Bodies
- 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… Arabian