W. G. Sebald

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”

“Tudo parecia organizado da melhor forma possível, como se de fato o mundo constasse somente de palavras, como se assim o próprio horror fosse trazido para dimensões seguras, como se para cad...”

“…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, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do...”

“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...”

“Had I realized at the time that for Austerlitz certain moments had no beginning or end, while on the other hand his whole life had sometimes seemed to him a blank point without duration, I w...”

“Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.”

“Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.”

“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...”

“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.”

“It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer - all that preoccupation and brooding.”

“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.”

“If you're based in two places, on a bad day you see only the disadvantages everywhere. On a bad day, returning to Germany brings back all kinds of spectres from the past.”

“Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.”

“A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.”

“In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and...”

“My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.”

“Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.”

“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...”

“When I was a boy, I'd hide under the kitchen table and wind string around the chairs. I have a sense now that I am pulling on those threads. The more I pull, the more it comes unraveled.”

“I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.”