W. G. Sebald Quotes

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

After a lot of laps, you start to get dizzy.

My senses of space, of distance, and of direction entirely vanished. When I looked for the ground I sometimes looked down, sometimes up, sometimes left, sometimes right. I thought I was very high up when I would suddenly be thown to earth in a near vertical spin. I thought I was very low to the ground and I was pulled up to 3,000 feet in two minutes by the 500-horsepower motor. It danced, it pushed, it tossed. . . . Ah! la la!

Tis looking downward makes one dizzy.

At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

According to Festus, our flying table, Buford, made it back safely while we were in Charleston, so those eagles didn't get him. Unfortunately, he lost the laundry bag with your pants." "Dang it!" Frank Barked, which Leo figured was probably severe profanity for him. No doubt Frank would've cursed some more -busting out the golly gees and the gosh darns- but Percy interrupted by doubling over and groaning. "Did the world just turn upside down?" he asked. Jason pressed his hands to his head. "Yeah, and it's spinning. Everything is yellow. Is it supposed to be yellow?

Seasick," Scatty mumbled. "That's exactly what it feels like. Only worse.

I get stoned, I can't get home, I'm calling long distance on a public saxophone. My head is achin', my back is breakin', feel I got run over by Captain Coconut and his dog named Rover.

She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.

My thoughts are whirled like a potter's wheel; I know not where I am nor what I do.

I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I'm made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats.

You say I'm small? I certainly can relate, although it is a matter of perspective. The distance is deceptive, my friend, you standtoo low.

This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the rooftop. It is just me thinking about being you. And before I headed back down the hill, I walked in a circle around your house, making an invisible line which you would have to cross before dark.

Things are going round and round in my head--or maybe my head is going round and round in things.

Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings. They make you feel small & confused & vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie & you know you are in a big space. Stand in the woods and you only sense it. They are vast, featureless nowhere. And they are alive.

I know you're all saying I can go to the moon but I can't find Pasadena.

Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.

I've come too far, and I don't know how to get back.

Looking up gives light, although at first it makes you dizzy.

You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?

The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.

I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.

That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.