W. G. Sebald Quotes
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In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.
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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.
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People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time.
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Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.
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I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him.
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Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
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By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment
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Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say.
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The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
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A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.
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We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
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It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.
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I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.
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...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.
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To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder.
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I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller.
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I don't want to talk about my trials and tribulations. Once you reveal even part of what your real problems might be in life, they come back in a deformed way.
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You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.
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It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
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A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.
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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 continually burgeoning anew.
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No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.
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And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
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Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.