W.G. SebaldThinkers

Black and white photography's gray zones stand for a territory that is located between life and death.

Combustion is the hidden principle and beating heart behind every artefact we create, from the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of those lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways.

The Dead is somehow more real than the living. The longer you think about it, the more it seems that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.

The Dead is 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.

The Decision is often based on the seemingly insignificant — we take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

The Detail is everything — tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

Experimentalism is to be practiced with care — by all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

History is the experiment and we are but that upon which the experiment is conducted — we learn from it as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.

History's representation 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.

Literature's moral background is the question of memory.

The Past is unlikely to have happened in this or that way, for nothing about it can be called normal: most of it is absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

The Past is not gone — we all have appointments with the past.