63 Quotes by W.G. Sebald

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

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.

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

Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.

I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind.

We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that’s performed upon it.

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.

At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.