Life Quote by W.G. Sebald

“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.” quote by W.G. Sebald — Download Open image

““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

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“The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance,…

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“...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…

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“Is the destruction not, rather, irrefutable proof that the catastrophes which develop, so to speak, in our hands and seem to break out suddenly…

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“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…

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“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…

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“It is hard, said Mme Landau, when I told her about those railway lessons, in the end it is hard to know what it…

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“...I remembered the story Evan the cobbler had told me, about the two headstreams of Dwy Fawr and Dwy Fach which are said to…

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“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…

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

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“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…

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

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“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,…

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What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of…

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