Quote

We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.

W. G. Sebald

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

W. G. Sebald
Age: 57 †
Born: 1944
Born: May 18
Died: 2001
Died: December 14
Literary Scholar
Photographer
Professor
Writer
W.G. Sebald
Much
Rabbits
Performed
Learns
Experiment
Experiments
Upon
Learn
History
Rabbit

More quotes by W. G. Sebald

Image
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.
W. G. Sebald
Image
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.
W. G. Sebald
Image
Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
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.
W. G. Sebald
Image
Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
W. G. Sebald
Image
We all have appointments with the past.
W. G. Sebald
Image
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.
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?
W. G. Sebald
Image
There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.
W. G. Sebald
Image
Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.
W. G. Sebald