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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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W. G. Sebald
Age: 57 †
Born: 1944
Born: May 18
Died: 2001
Died: December 14
Literary Scholar
Photographer
Professor
Writer
W.G. Sebald
Actually
Gathered
Past
Unlikely
Nothing
Images
Way
Absurd
Seemed
Normal
Called
Happened
Appalling

More quotes by 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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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
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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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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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It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
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
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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.
W. G. Sebald
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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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By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
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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Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
W. G. Sebald
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Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
W. G. Sebald
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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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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
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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
W. G. Sebald
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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.
W. G. Sebald
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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.
W. G. Sebald
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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
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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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How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?
W. G. Sebald