Quote

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

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
Dark
Seemed
White
Questions
Children
Green
Plumage
Even
Answer
Colours
Mind
Particular
Ducks
Always
Answers
Colour
Possible
Snow
Child
Kept

More quotes by 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
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
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
W. G. Sebald
Image
Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
W. G. Sebald
Image
In my photographic work I was always especially entranced... by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them.
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
W. G. Sebald
Image
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
Image
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
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
A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.
W. G. Sebald
Image
We all have appointments with the past.
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
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