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

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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.
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We all have appointments with the past.
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And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
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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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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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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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At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.
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We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
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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 begin to wane and when it will fade away.
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Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
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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 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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By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
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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 or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.
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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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This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.
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Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.
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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.
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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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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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