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Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
W. G. Sebald
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W. G. Sebald
Age: 57 †
Born: 1944
Born: May 18
Died: 2001
Died: December 14
Literary Scholar
Photographer
Professor
Writer
W.G. Sebald
Heart
Reduced
Like
Possessed
Slowly
Desires
Bodies
Machines
Desire
Embers
Body
Devised
More quotes by W. G. Sebald
In my photographic work I was always especially entranced... by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them.
W. G. Sebald
Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
W. G. Sebald
It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds
W. G. Sebald
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
W. G. Sebald
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 the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
W. G. Sebald
... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.
W. G. Sebald
No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.
W. G. Sebald
We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
W. G. Sebald
I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.
W. G. Sebald
I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.
W. G. Sebald
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 in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.
W. G. Sebald
At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.
W. G. Sebald
At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.
W. G. Sebald
We all have appointments with the past.
W. G. Sebald
One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.
W. G. Sebald
By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
W. G. Sebald
Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.
W. G. Sebald
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, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.
W. G. Sebald
A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom
W. G. Sebald
We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
W. G. Sebald
