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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

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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
Hours
Fade
Away
Fades
Human
Intense
Humans
Hour
Begin
Civilization
Strange
Growing
Wane

More quotes by 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.
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Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
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Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
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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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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.
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How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?
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It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
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By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
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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.
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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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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.
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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
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Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.
W. G. Sebald
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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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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
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At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.
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.
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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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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.
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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