W. G. Sebald Quotes

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

O Time and change! - with hair as gray as was my sire's that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on!

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.

Moving is easy, exciting, an adventure - when you're young. Later, not so much. I love Massachusetts, my old home. Sometimes, late at night, I even study the real estate ads in my old hometown. But it's not even a fantasy. My parents are both gone. The world I left doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the person I was.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

Alas! the fleeting years, how they roll on!

The problem with time, I've learned, whether it's those first two weeks I got to spend with you, or the final two months I got to spend with him, eventually time always runs out. I have no idea where you are out there in the world, John. But I understand that I lost the right to know these things long ago. No matter how many years go by, I know one thing to be as true as ever was - I'll see you soon then.

Time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days.

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.

We tried not to age, but time had its rage.

I feel more and more the time wasted that is not spent in Ireland.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

It can make you sad to look at pictures from your youth. So there's a trick to it. The trick is not to look at the later pictures.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

I had many decades of me time and now I just don't have that anymore. There are days when I rail against it.

But where are the snows of yester year?

What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible.

You can't really go back to where you came from. I don't think any of us can.

The moon I see now is the same moon I saw before. Except that before, when I looked at it, it was in anticipation of what it would be like when I got there. That's behind me now.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.