Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Writing
Models
Opens
Possibility
Pattern
Gives
Established
Freedom
Limitation
Write
Possibilities
Form
Genre
Take
Model
Structural
Giving
Patterns
Tight
More quotes by W. G. Sebald
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
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
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
How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.
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
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
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
No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.
W. G. Sebald
Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!
W. G. Sebald
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
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
How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?
W. G. Sebald
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
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.
W. G. Sebald
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
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 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.
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
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
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
