W.G. Sebald quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from W.G. Sebald on Wise Famous Quotes.

No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.

In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.

The population decided - out of sheer panic at first - to carry on as if nothing had happened.
- Air War and Literature: The Zurich Lectures

The current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.

Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

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?

By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.

Dr K. relishes the pleasures (but only, as he notes himself, the pleasures) of being declassed.

This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down.

And once he said do not forget
the north wind brings
light from the house of Aries
to the apple trees

In the house of shadows where the legend rises the deciphering begins

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.

What distinguishes art from such undertaker's business is that life's closeness to death is its theme, not its addiction.

Looking back, you might say that Ambros Adelwarth the private man had ceased to exist, that nothing was left but his shell of decorum.

Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

I have even begun to speak in foreign tongues roaming like a nomad in my own town.

We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.

How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.

A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.

Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say.

It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other.

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.

He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.

We all have appointments with the past.

How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?

How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.

Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

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.

It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

It just takes one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes

Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.