W. G. Sebald Quotes
The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors the present state of our civilization and its profound discontents. As wide-ranging as it is incisive, this astonishing work is a testimony both to the muted suffering of millions and to the great courage it must have taken the author to set his mind against it.
Quotes to Explore
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Age for me is just a number.
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Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
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I like science fiction, I like fantasy, I like time travel, so I had this idea: What if you had a phone that could call into the past?
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Live rich, die poor; never make the mistake of doing it the other way round.
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The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
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Every body about me seem'd happy but every body seem'd in a hurry to be happy somewhere else.
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There was definitely a time where I did not believe in the Lord. I needed to understand the love of God.
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My heart is mysteriously alive in the world of sounds - a totally different dimension from the daily life.
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Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass - you don't see it, but somehow it does something.
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I already had high blood pressure. I have hypertension. And I think the chemo was just too much for my kidneys. And they went into failure. And that was September 12th of 2008. And the doctor rushed me right to the hospital.
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I was a 'Duck Hunt' and 'Mario' guy, and stuff like that. I was never technologically driven. I never had all the cool, new toys. I was the youngest child, I wasn't the only child, so I wasn't spoiled as a kid. And, we were on the farm, so we didn't have a lot. Also, with computers, I'm not very good with them. I just check my email.
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I definitely think there's some way to understand how people emotionally feel about somebody, but I don't think data collects it. They're not going to click your bit.ly link or click your TweetMeme retweet every time.
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Probably the geekiest attribute that I have of them all is that I've always had a hard time meeting friends. Like no matter where I grew up and I moved around, I always had a hard time.
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Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. I want to make Ruby users free. I want to give them the freedom to choose.
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It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.
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There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.
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I hate Valentine's day. It is a day for nothing but disappointment.
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Scientific advancement should aim to affirm and to improve human life.
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So much progress has been made with topics like mental illness and drug abuse and sexual identity.
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France in August when you can travel through the entire country without encountering a single pesky Frenchman or being bothered with anything that's open for business.
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Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.
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I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.
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The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors the present state of our civilization and its profound discontents. As wide-ranging as it is incisive, this astonishing work is a testimony both to the muted suffering of millions and to the great courage it must have taken the author to set his mind against it.
