Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
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
Experimental
Experiment
Experiments
Reader
Means
Part
Mean
More quotes by 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
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.
W. G. Sebald
Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.
W. G. Sebald
We all have appointments with the past.
W. G. Sebald
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.
W. G. Sebald
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
We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
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
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
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
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
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
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
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
It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
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
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
It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds
W. G. Sebald
At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.
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
