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Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

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
Even
Course
Degree
Engrossed
Work
Greater
Mental
Intuitively
Never
Understanding
Degrees
Fathom
Life
Means
Perhaps
Constructs
Sense
Lose
Govern
Reality
Loses
Increasing
Able
Shall
Precise
Mean
Courses
Complexity

More quotes by W. G. Sebald

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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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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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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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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
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And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
W. G. Sebald
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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.
W. G. Sebald
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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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And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.
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Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
W. G. Sebald
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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.
W. G. Sebald
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Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
W. G. Sebald
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... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.
W. G. Sebald
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A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.
W. G. Sebald
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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.
W. G. Sebald
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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.
W. G. Sebald
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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
W. G. Sebald
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We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
W. G. Sebald
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There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.
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I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind.
W. G. Sebald
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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.
W. G. Sebald