“What distinguishes art from such undertaker's business is that life's closeness to death is its theme, not its addiction.” — W.G. Sebald Addiction Copy Share Image
“I have even begun to speak in foreign tongues roaming like a nomad in my own town.” — W.G. Sebald Copy Share Image
“All things, my son, transmute into old age, life diminishes, everything declines, the proliferation of kinds is a mere illusion, and no… — W.G. Sebald Illusion Copy Share Image
“But I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul.” — W.G. Sebald Copy Share Image
“All my green places are lost to me, she once said, adding that only now did she truly understand how wonderful it… — W.G. Sebald Lost Said Copy Share Image
“Like our bodies and our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.… — W.G. Sebald Computers Copy Share Image
“It is hard, said Mme Landau, when I told her about those railway lessons, in the end it is hard to know… — W.G. Sebald Death Copy Share Image
“Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of a dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy,… — W.G. Sebald Dumbness 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… — W.G. Sebald Nature Copy Share Image
“At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty… — W.G. Sebald Changes Copy Share Image
“…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the… — W.G. Sebald Death Copy Share Image
“Beyle's advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one's travels, since before very long they will… — W.G. Sebald Advice 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… — W.G. Sebald Remains 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… — W.G. Sebald Execution 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… — W.G. Sebald Change Copy Share Image
“After resting in the cool, shadowy interior for a while, with feelings of both gratitude and distaste, he set off once more,… — W.G. Sebald Sentences 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… — W.G. Sebald Books 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… — W.G. Sebald Lake 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… — W.G. Sebald Authenticity Copy Share Image
“I remember to this day how easily I could grasp what he called his tentative ideas when he talked about the architectural… — W.G. Sebald Investing Copy Share Image
“To him it seemed a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes,… — W.G. Sebald Copy Share Image
“Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings listed in order of size, and it would be… — W.G. Sebald Buildings Copy Share Image
“For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one… — W.G. Sebald Learning Copy Share Image
“From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which… — W.G. Sebald Civilization 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… — W.G. Sebald Contradiction Copy Share Image
“Is the destruction not, rather, irrefutable proof that the catastrophes which develop, so to speak, in our hands and seem to break… — W.G. Sebald Catastrophes Copy Share Image
“Anthropological theory assumes that exposure in a treeless situation where all escape upwards was cut off led to the invention of myths.… — W.G. Sebald Storytelling Copy Share Image
“They were all as timeless as that moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring, these ornaments, utensils, and mementos stranded in… — W.G. Sebald Time Copy Share Image
“Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his… — W.G. Sebald Time Copy Share Image
“The population decided—out of sheer panic at first—to carry on as if nothing had happened. - “Air War and Literature: The Zurich… — W.G. Sebald Books Copy Share Image
“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 Separating Copy Share Image
“I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they… — W.G. Sebald Death Copy Share Image
“In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak,… — W.G. Sebald Memories Copy Share Image
“Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other, all I felt was the… — W.G. Sebald Dreams Copy Share Image
“He felt closer to dust, he said, then to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a… — W.G. Sebald Little by little Copy Share Image
“Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life,… — W.G. Sebald Connections Copy Share Image
“I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the… — W.G. Sebald Magnifying Copy Share Image
“I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects… — W.G. Sebald Aftermath Copy Share Image
“It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel… — W.G. Sebald Dreams Copy Share Image
“From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of those… — W.G. Sebald Combustion Copy Share Image
