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W. G. Sebald

W. G. Sebald Books

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Austerlitz

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Vertigo

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The Emigrants

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“As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.”

PeopleKnowsPoliticalNationsCitiesMillionsDoubtSubjectsMilitaryDestructionLogicDebateGermanyNo DoubtCampsJustified
Author:W. G. Sebald
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“No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.”

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Book:The Rings of Saturn
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“...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”

ThinkingWorldMindLittlesDoeMemoriesDarknessHeardObjectsLiftsOblivionDraining
Book:Austerlitz
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“How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.”

IfsMindSaidBookNightHouseLeftFeltLinesDarkPerfectPaperShadowMovedFollowingSecureWanderSatTwilightDesksPencilsAccordFidelityMake OutDark Night
Book:Austerlitz
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“Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.”

KnowsMeanRealityAbleCoursesUnderstandingLosesGreaterDegreesComplexityPreciseConstructsFathom
Book:The Rings of Saturn
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“I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?”

GivingWellsDreamRealitySeemsActorsAudienceAirBloodStageSceneTheaterStormPainterDustCuriousManagersDesertLakesGrainBreezeHandfulPlaywrightPondsHyperInfernoSubmergedStage Managers
Author:W. G. Sebald
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“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.”

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Book:The Rings of Saturn
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“The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors the present state of our civilization and its profound discontents. As wide-ranging as it is incisive, this astonishing work is a testimony both to the muted suffering of millions and to the great courage it must have taken the author to set his mind against it.”

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Author:W. G. Sebald
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“I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all... only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry[the geometric measurement of solid bodies], between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.”

IfsThinkingFeelsStillsBodySeemsEyeMovingFormSpaceAliveHigherVariousBack And ForthMeasurementUnrealGeometric
Author:W. G. Sebald
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