Top 60 W.G. Sebald Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— W.G. Sebald

2. “Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.”

— W.G. Sebald

3. “Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!”

— W.G. Sebald

4. “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

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

— W.G. Sebald

6. “Time, that most abstract of humanity’s homes.”

— W.G. Sebald

7. “At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”

— W.G. Sebald

8. “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.”

— W.G. Sebald

9. “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.”

— W.G. Sebald

10. “I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.”

— W.G. Sebald

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

— W.G. Sebald

12. “We all have appointments with the past.”

— W.G. Sebald

13. “Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.”

— W.G. Sebald

14. “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: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.”

— W.G. Sebald

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

— W.G. Sebald

16. “A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom.”

— W.G. Sebald

17. “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.”

— W.G. Sebald

18. “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.”

— W.G. Sebald

19. “How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.”

— W.G. Sebald

20. “By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment.”

— W.G. Sebald

21. “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.”

— W.G. Sebald

22. “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.”

— W.G. Sebald

23. “I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind...”

— W.G. Sebald

24. “We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that’s performed upon it.”

— W.G. Sebald

25. “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

26. “At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.”

— W.G. Sebald

27. “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

28. “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

29. “It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.”

— W.G. Sebald

30. “How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?”

— W.G. Sebald

31. “Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.”

— W.G. Sebald

32. “A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.”

— W.G. Sebald

33. “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 your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.”

— W.G. Sebald

34. “Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.”

— W.G. Sebald

35. “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.”

— W.G. Sebald

36. “Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand.”

— W.G. Sebald

37. “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 would probably have waited more patiently.”

— W.G. Sebald

38. “On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.”

— W.G. Sebald

39. “They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.”

— W.G. Sebald

40. “In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.”

— W.G. Sebald

41. “How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.”

— W.G. Sebald

42. “But I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul.”

— W.G. Sebald

43. “Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of a dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.”

— W.G. Sebald

44. “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?”

— W.G. Sebald

45. “But it isn’t true, said Marie, it isn’t true that we need absence and loneliness. It isn’t true. It’s only in your mind. You are afraid of I don’t know what.”

— W.G. Sebald

46. “All my green places are lost to me, she once said, adding that only now did she truly understand how wonderful it is to stand by the rail of a river steamer without a care in the world.”

— W.G. Sebald

47. “Our concern with history... is a concern with preformed images already imprinted in our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.”

— W.G. Sebald

48. “Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.”

— W.G. Sebald

49. “From the outset my main concern was with the shape and the self-contained nature of discrete things, the curve of banisters on a staircase, the molding of a stone arch over a gateway, the tangled precision of the blades in a tussock of dried grass.”

— W.G. Sebald

50. “I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the piercing inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the gray light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.”

— W.G. Sebald