Austerlitz Quotes | W. G. Sebald | Scribble Whatever

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Austerlitz Quotes
Austerlitz
W. G. Sebald (Author of Austerlitz)

“All my green places are lost to me, she once said, adding that only now did she truly understand how wonderful it is to stand by the rail of a river steamer without a care in the world.” (Austerlitz Quotes)

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“Finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog.”

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“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
Austerlitz

“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
Austerlitz

“However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.”

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“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
Austerlitz

“In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.”

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and 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
Austerlitz

“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
Austerlitz

“It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyze my entire system.”

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

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

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“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
Austerlitz

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

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“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
Austerlitz

“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
Austerlitz

“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
Austerlitz

“The further you can rise above the earth the better, he said, and for that same reason he had decided to study astronomy.”

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions.”

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“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
Austerlitz

“Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place and rush headlong by in another?”

W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

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Austerlitz Quotes

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