W. G. Sebald Quotes

Winfried Georg Sebald (1944-2001)

W. G. Sebald also known as Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by literary critics as one of the greatest living authors. (W. G. Sebald Quotes

“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.”
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn

“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
Vertigo

“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.”
W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“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
On the Natural History of Destruction

“At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.”
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn

“Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them.”
W. G. Sebald
Vertigo

“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

“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

“From the outset, the now legendary and in some respects genuinely admirable reconstruction of the country after the devastation wrought by Germany’s wartime enemies, a reconstruction tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the nation’s own past history, prohibited any look backward.”
W. G. Sebald
On the Natural History of Destruction

“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

“He felt closer to dust, he said, then to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remain undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.”
W. G. Sebald
The Emigrants

“He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.”
W. G. Sebald
The Emigrants

“How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.”
W. G. Sebald
Vertigo

“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

“I have even begun to speak in foreign tongues roaming like a nomad in my own town.”
W. G. Sebald
Across the Land and the Water

“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 Quotes)
W. G. Sebald
Austerlitz

“In the house of shadows where the legend rises the deciphering begins”
W. G. Sebald
Across the Land and the Water

“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 is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
W. G. Sebald
Vertigo

“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

“Later, Heinrich Boll suggested that such experiences of collective uprooting are at the origin of the German craving for travel: a sense of being unable to stay anywhere, a constant need to be somewhere else. In terms of social conditioning, this would make the ebb and flow of the population bombed out of their homes rather like a rehearsal for initiation into the mobile society that would form in the decades after the catastrophe.”
W. G. Sebald
On the Natural History of Destruction

“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

“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

“Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced – consciousness – and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next.”
W. G. Sebald
The Emigrants

“Looking back, you might say that Ambros Adelwarth the private man had ceased to exist, that nothing was left but his shell of decorum.”
W. G. Sebald
The Emigrants

“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

“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
The Emigrants

“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

“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

“On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.”
W. G. Sebald
The Rings of Saturn

“Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamor on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water. It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.” (W. G. Sebald Quotes)
W. G. Sebald
Vertigo

“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

“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
The Rings of Saturn

“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

“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

“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
Vertigo

“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
The Emigrants

“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
The Emigrants

“There is something peculiarly dispiriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.”
W. G. Sebald
Vertigo

“There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.” (W. G. Sebald Quotes)
W. G. Sebald
The Emigrants

“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

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

“Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!”
W. G. Sebald
Vertigo

“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

“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