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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

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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
Inner
Result
Conscious
Steps
Adjustments
Results
Decisive
Almost
Adjustment
Lives
Slight
Take
Barely

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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.
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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.
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Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
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Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.
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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.
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It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.
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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 bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.
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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.
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By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
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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.
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How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.
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A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom
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It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
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No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.
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Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
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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.
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We all have appointments with the past.
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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.
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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 by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.
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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
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