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 Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I’m there. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can’t forget, you embroider… The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
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. W. G. Sebald Read Quote
