Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Con…

- W. G. Sebald

We all have appointments with the past.

- W. G. Sebald

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

- W. G. Sebald

One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir.…

- W. G. Sebald

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

- W. G. Sebald

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 noth…

- W. G. Sebald

How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?

- W. G. Sebald

In my photographic work I was always especially entranced... by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exp…

- W. G. Sebald

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 …

- W. G. Sebald