Quotes by W.G. Sebald

“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...”

“Tudo parecia organizado da melhor forma possvel, como se de fato o mundo constasse somente de palavras, como se assim o prprio horror fosse trazido para dimenses seguras, como se para cada aspecto ...”

“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 appea...”

“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...”

“I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying ove...”

“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.”

“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 a...”

“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 pr...”

“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 c...”

“And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places a...”

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

“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.”

“...and Vra said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But i...”

“I cannot now recall exactly what creatures I saw on that visit to the Antwerp Nocturama, but there were probably bats and jerboas from Egypt and the Gobi Desert, native European hedgehogs and owls,...”

“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!”

“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 bod...”

“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 clamour on the editorial floor, but in the evening I cross over to an island...”

“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...”

“For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not...”

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