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“A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes. Especially at the time that the continent of America was being colonized, it was noticeable that the townships spread to the west even was their eastern districts were falling apart.” (The Rings of Saturn Quotes)
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn
“At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.”
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn
“But that day, as I sat on the tranquil shore, it was possible to believe one was gazing into eternity.”
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn
“But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere neverending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is!–so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful.”
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn
“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
The Rings of Saturn
“Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.”
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn
“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
The Rings of Saturn
“On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.”
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn
“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.” (The Rings of Saturn Quotes)
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn
“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
The Rings of Saturn
“They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.”
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn
“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
The Rings of Saturn
“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
The Rings of Saturn
“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
The Rings of Saturn
