Quotes from W. G. Sebald

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

It would be presumptuous to say writing a book would be a sufficient gesture, but if people were more preoccupied with the past, maybe the events that overwhelm us would be fewer.

I've always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again.

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

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

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.

I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position.

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.

My father was not really a presence for me. He was away; he was in the German army.

The writing I do makes great demands on translators.

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.

Mine is a European imagination, shaped largely by my very promiscuous reading in German, French, English and, with greater difficulty, Italian.

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.

People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that 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 people didn't exist.

To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder.

I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit.

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.

My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing.

... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.

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.

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

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.

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 groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form.