63 Quotes by W.G. Sebald

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.

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.

Thirty-six degrees, according to Alphonso, has always proved the best natural level, a kind of magic threshold, and it had sometimes occurred to him, Alphonso, said Austerlitz, that all mankind's misfortunes were connected with its departure at some point in time from that norm, and with the slightly feverish, overheated condition in which we constantly found ourselves.

There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.

It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

Time, that most abstract of humanity’s homes.