Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Come
Bones
Polished
Seven
Pair
Later
Pairs
Dead
Boots
Times
Ice
Found
Edge
Back
Edges
Ever
Decades
Returning
More quotes by W. G. Sebald
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
A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.
W. G. Sebald
We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
W. G. Sebald
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
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
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
W. G. Sebald
Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
W. G. Sebald
How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?
W. G. Sebald
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.
W. G. Sebald
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
By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
W. G. Sebald
We all have appointments with the past.
W. G. Sebald
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.
W. G. Sebald
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
Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
W. G. Sebald
Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.
W. G. Sebald
It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
W. G. Sebald
... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.
W. G. Sebald
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
At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.
W. G. Sebald
