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Top WG Sebald Quotes

Browse top 53 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by WG Sebald.

Favorite WG Sebald Quotes

1. "É um vazio todo peculiar que surge quando, numa cidade estranha, a pessoa disca números de telefone em vão. Quando ninguém atende, é uma decepção de alcance transcendente, como se esses números aleatórios fossem uma questão de vida ou morte." ~ W.G. Sebald
2. "It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane." ~ W.G. Sebald
3. "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
4. "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
5. "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
6. "...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on." ~ W.G. Sebald
7. "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
8. "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
9. "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
10. "How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper." ~ W.G. Sebald
11. "No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open." ~ W.G. Sebald
12. "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
13. "In the warmer months of the year one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner. Sometimes, seeing one of these moths that have met their end in my house, I wonder what kind of fear and pain they feel while they are lost." ~ W.G. Sebald
14. "To him it seemed a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow. Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names: Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star. Indeed, old families last not three oaks. 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
15. "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
16. "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 second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit." ~ W.G. Sebald
17. "They were all as timeless as that moment of rescue, perpetuated but forever just occurring, these ornaments, utensils, and mementos stranded in the Terazín bazaar, objects that for reasons one could never know had outlived their former owners and survived the process of destruction, so that I could now see my own faint shadow image barely perceptible among them." ~ W.G. Sebald
18. "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
19. "After resting in the cool, shadowy interior for a while, with feelings of both gratitude and distaste, he set off once more, and as he left, just as one might ruffle the hair of a son or younger brother, he ran his fingers over the marble locks of a dwarfish figure which, at the foot of one of the mighty columns, had been bearing the immense weight of a holy-water font for centuries." ~ W.G. Sebald
20. "The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings." ~ W.G. Sebald
21. "Op de voorgrond, dicht bij de rechterhand van het schilderij, is een dame ten val gekomen. Ze draagt en kanariegele jurk; de cavalier die zich bezorgd over haar heen buigt een rode, in het vale licht zeer opvallende broek. Als ik nu naar die rivier kijk, zei Austerlitz, en aan dat schilderij met zijn kleine figuurtjes denk, heb ik het gevoel dat het door Lucas van Valckenborch weergegeven ogenblik nooit voorbij is gegaan, dat de kanariegele dame pas zojuist is gevallen of bewusteloos geraakt, dat haar zwartfluwelen muts net pas naast haar hoofd is gerold, dat het kleine ongeluk waaraan de meeste beschouwers ongetwijfeld voorbijzien, telkens opnieuw gebeurt, dat het nooit meer ophoudt en door niets en niemand meer goed te maken valt." ~ W.G. Sebald
22. "This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down." ~ W.G. Sebald
23. "Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other, all I felt was the swaying of the precarious structure on which I stood, stricken with Terror at the realization that the ends of the balancing pole gleaming far out on the edges of my field of vision were no longer my guiding lights, as before, but malignant enticements to me to cast myself into the depths." ~ W.G. Sebald
24. "Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of a dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds" ~ W.G. Sebald
25. "Und wer weiß, sagte Austerlitz, vielleicht träumen auch die Motten oder der Kopfsalat im Garten, wenn er zum Mond hinaufblickt in der Nacht." ~ W.G. Sebald
26. "I remember to this day how easily I could grasp what he called his tentative ideas when he talked about the architectural style of the capitalist era, a subject which he said had fascinated him since his own student days, speaking in particular of the compulsive sense of order and the tendency towards monumentalism evident in law courts and penal institutions, railway stations and stock exchanges, opera houses and lunatic asylums, and the dwelling built to rectangular grid patterns for the labor force." ~ W.G. Sebald
27. "The population decided—out of sheer panic at first—to carry on as if nothing had happened.- "Air War and Literature: The Zurich Lectures" ~ W.G. Sebald
28. "I have even begun to speak in foreign tongues roaming like a nomad in my own town." ~ W.G. Sebald
29. "Op een gegeven moment vielen me midden in een groen veld een paar kippen op die zich, hoewel de regen nog helemaal niet zo lang geleden was opgehouden, een naar mijn idee voor die kleine witte beestjes enorm stuk hadden verwijderd van de boerderij waar ze thuishoorden. Om een reden die ik nog steeds niet helemaal kan begrijpen heeft de aanblik van dat groepje kippen dat zich zo ver het vrije veld in had gewaagd, mij toen zeer geraakt. Ik weet hoe dan ook niet wat het aan bepaalde dingen of wezens is dat mij soms zo ontroert." ~ W.G. Sebald
30. "Because (in principle) things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them: they carry the experiences they have had with us inside them and are - in fact- the book of our history opened before us." ~ W.G. Sebald
31. "Is the destruction not, rather, irrefutable proof that the catastrophes which develop, so to speak, in our hands and seem to break out suddenly are a kind of experiment, anticipating the point at which we shall drop out of what we will have thought for so long to be our autonomous history and back into the history of nature?" ~ W.G. Sebald
32. "You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn't any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I'm striving for is authenticity; none of it is real." ~ W.G. Sebald
33. "In this little booklet, which had belonged to a maternal great-uncle of ... mine, who spent some time working as an office clerk in northern Italy towards the end of the last century, everything seemed arranged in the best of all possible ways, quite as though the world was made up purely of letters and words and as if, through this act of transformation, even the greatest of horrors were safely banished, as if to each dark side there were a redeeming counterpart, to every evil its good, to every pain its pleasure, and to every lie a measure of truth." ~ W.G. Sebald
34. "Anthropological theory assumes that exposure in a treeless situation where all escape upwards was cut off led to the invention of myths. Kafka's ape, dragged into human society, expresses very similar ideas in his 'Report for an Academy'. It is the absence of any way of escape that has forced him to become human himself." ~ W.G. Sebald
35. "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
36. "…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision." ~ W.G. Sebald
37. "How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all." ~ W.G. Sebald
38. "At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory." ~ W.G. Sebald
39. "I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?" ~ W.G. Sebald
40. "Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I would probably have waited more patiently." ~ W.G. Sebald
41. "I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last bath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony,until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner." ~ W.G. Sebald
42. "Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder." ~ W.G. Sebald
43. "From the outset my main concern was with the shape and the self-contained nature of discrete things, the curve of banisters on a staircase, the molding of a stone arch over a gateway, the tangled precision of the blades in a tussock of dried grass." ~ W.G. Sebald
44. "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
45. "It is hard, said Mme Landau, when I told her about those railway lessons, in the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of. Yes, it is very hard, said Mme Landau, one really doesn't know." ~ W.G. Sebald
46. "Dr K. relishes the pleasures (but only, as he notes himself, the pleasures) of being declassed." ~ W.G. Sebald
47. "Tudo parecia organizado da melhor forma possível, como se de fato o mundo constasse somente de palavras, como se assim o próprio horror fosse trazido para dimensões seguras, como se para cada aspecto de uma coisa houvesse um reverso, para cada mal um bem, para cada dissabor um prazer, para cada infelicidade uma felicidade e para cada mentira um quinhão de verdade." ~ W.G. Sebald
48. "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
49. "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
50. "At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms. But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do!" ~ W.G. Sebald
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