Quote

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

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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
Take
Model
Structural
Giving
Patterns
Tight
Writing
Models
Opens
Possibility
Pattern
Gives
Established
Freedom
Limitation
Write
Possibilities
Form
Genre

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Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
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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.
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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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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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Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
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... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.
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By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
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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.
W. G. Sebald
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Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
W. G. Sebald
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A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.
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We all have appointments with the past.
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And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
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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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Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
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