I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business. W. G. Sebald More Quotes by W. G. Sebald More Quotes From 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 understandingmeanreality At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory. W. G. Sebald eyememoriesbelieve ... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. W. G. Sebald slow-downoblivionfields 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 layersemotionpast 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 eyemeanthinking Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything! W. G. Sebald tinydetails And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. 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 growingstrangecivilization Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. W. G. Sebald animalmenfunny 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 ducksdarkchildren 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 patternswritinggiving 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 machinesdesireheart 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 perspectiveviewsclouds How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all. W. G. Sebald hoursstillsdifferent 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 bookideasthinking The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors the present state of our civilization and its profound discontents. As wide-ranging as it is incisive, this astonishing work is a testimony both to the muted suffering of millions and to the great courage it must have taken the author to set his mind against it. W. G. Sebald mirrorstakencivilization Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes. W. G. Sebald abstracthumanityhome As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities. W. G. Sebald militarycitiespeople 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 telephonescitiesnumbers How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning? W. G. Sebald cases
