W.G. Sebald

Quotes

• “Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the...”
• “Tudo parecia organizado da melhor forma possível, como se de fato o mundo constasse somente de palavras, como se assim o...”
• “Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps th...”
• “In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, s...”
• “The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almos...”
• “And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before a...”
• “It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and wer...”
• “...to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience i...”
• “Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whol...”
• “…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, tha...”
• “The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circul...”
• “I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind ...”
• “At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms. But th...”
• “Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and i...”
• “However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to des...”
• “Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!”