W. G. Sebald Quotes

I no longer knew what it was like to feel Australian.

I don't necessarily feel like I'm American. I wouldn't know what that feels like.

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

There's this brutal imperial power, that my passport says I represent. But it will never represent where my heart lives, only vaguely where it went.

I've never felt British. I'm just not interested in national identity. I don't know why.

I feel like sometimes that I was not meant for this society.

A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere.

For Americans I'll always be Israeli, and for Israelis I'll always be American. But I really have no need for definitions.

Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

I don't think I'll ever escape the fact that I don't belong anywhere in particular. I've often dreamed about going back to Nigeria, but that's a very romantic notion. It's a hideous country to go to in reality.

I didn't know what country I represented anymore.

I used to feel I was more French than anything, but I don't feel that way anymore. I really don't feel like I belong to a specific country, and it is so difficult for people to understand that.

We don't feel part of the country scene any longer, it can't be our home any more... So we now consider ourselves part of the big Rock 'n' Roll family.

It's great to be British, really. If anything happens, I'm back to my country. At least I have a country.

I've never felt at home in Kortedala, or in Gothenburg, so I always felt like I needed to go somewhere and find some kind of perspective on things.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

While the rest of the country waves the flag of Americana, we understand we are not part of that. We don't owe America anything - America owes us.

One of the interesting things about "outsidership" is that underneath it there's a longing to belong. I just wish the thing I refused to belong to - the species, Western capital culture - was a little more respectable. My one true relaxation is my flotation tank, in which I can either meditate or just drift off.

I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood - what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain.

I don't really identify with America, I don't really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don't really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don't. All the definitions are there, but I don't really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

Right now everything looks so strange to me, as if I don't belong here. It's me that's out of place. And the worst thing is that I feel there's somewhere I do belong, but I just can't find it.