W. G. Sebald

“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.”

“Men and animals are in the same boat, a sinking boat.”

“I feel that the decrepitude of the recent past is much more disquieting than the ruins of distant ages.”

“Reality, it seemed, was an utterly mismanaged affair.”

“The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal.”

“Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness.”

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

“We, the survivors, see everything that we have survived as ecstatically shining when in fact it is only black.”

“At the time I did not understand that the half-life of sorrow is shorter than the half-life of happiness.”

“It is a sore point with me that I have been characterized as a writer of ‘post-Holocaust’ literature.”

“How is it that we are so little able to grant or ask for forgiveness?”

“All is shade, and all is light.”

“To have a text, you have to be haunted.”

“The moral backbone of the writer is a healthy distrust of the collective.”

“Our concern with history... is a concern with pre-formed images.”

“The photographic image is a kind of specter, or a ghost.”

“For I, and I alone, was responsible for the sad way in which my life had turned out.”