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W. G. Sebald Biography

Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors[citation needed] and had been tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a 2007 interview, Horace Engdahl, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned Sebald, Ryszard Kapuściński and Jacques Derrida as three recently deceased writers who would have been worthy laureates.

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W. G. Sebald Quotes

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

Dead, Returning

How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.

Book, Dark, Lamplight, Sat, Tip, Twilight

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.

Becoming, Civilization, Mirrors, Muted, Taken

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.

Boots, Decades, Ice, Pairs, Seven, Times

We all have appointments with the past.

Appointments, Military, Past

Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

Chronology, Determined, Essentially, Layers, Past

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

Fall, Falls, Men, Summer, Wish, Wretchedness

There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.

Cities, Dispriting, Numbers, Same, Telephones, Wells

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

Backbone, Greater, Happy Life, Memories, Mind, Moral

As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.

1945, Call, Cities, Mainly, Military, People

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all. . . only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry[the geometric measurement of solid bodies], between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and 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.

Dead, Eye, Eyes, Moving, Rules, Thinking

I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind.

Children, Dark, Ducks, Green, Particular

We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.

Experiment, Experiments, Learns, Performed, Rabbit, Rabbits

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

Bearing, Century, Economy, Interest, Slave

This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.

Falsification, History, Perspective, Survivor, Survivors

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

Childhood, Doors, Explain, Open, Terror

Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

Decide, Details, Everything, Tiny

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 have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.

Already, House, Life, Space, Time, Waiting

One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir. . . as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.

Despair, Littles, Memories, Memory, Photographs

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

Abstract, Home, Homes, Humanity, Time

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