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And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
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
Returning
Dead
Ever
More quotes by W. G. Sebald
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
... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.
W. G. Sebald
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
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
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
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
Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
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
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
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
We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
W. G. Sebald
Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.
W. G. Sebald
To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.
W. G. Sebald
We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
W. G. Sebald
No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.
W. G. Sebald
At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.
W. G. Sebald
How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.
W. G. Sebald
It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
W. G. Sebald
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
Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
W. G. Sebald
