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Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

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
Everything
Entombed
Produced
Civilization

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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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We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
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We all have appointments with the past.
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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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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.
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... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.
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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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A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom
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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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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
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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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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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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How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?
W. G. Sebald
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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.
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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