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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.

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
Different
Wished
None
Nation
Nations
Hours
Stills
Still
Sleepless
Better
Belonged

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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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How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?
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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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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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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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A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.
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It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
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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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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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We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
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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.
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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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Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
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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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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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Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
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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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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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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.
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I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind.
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