W. G. Sebald Short Quotes

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How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?

W. G. Sebald
The current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.

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

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

W. G. Sebald
Whenever one is imagining a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner.

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

W. G. Sebald
No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.

W. G. Sebald
We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

W. G. Sebald
Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

W. G. Sebald
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.

W. G. Sebald
If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he's looking for.

W. G. Sebald
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.

W. G. Sebald