W. G. Sebald Quotes

You know, London is so sprawling, and you can sometimes forget that anybody else is on a stage anywhere else.

But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.

Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.

You feel quite distant by playing at huge stadiums year after year, where you only can see a great darkness in front of you.

I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

In N.Y. you're always around people, but in L.A. you can go days without seeing anyone.

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

All this technology for connection and what we really only know more about is how anonymous we are in the grand scheme of things.

Most of us live in artificial environments and then we go to work in artificial environments and the world becomes something that you see through a window.

Have you ever, on a cloudless night, looked down from a passing aircraft flying over Canada? Endless, glowing strings of cities, towns, and homesteads. Stretching on and on, one province to the next. With only the stars in the distance.

I meet so many people, but I don't know anybody.

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

Slowly but surely, I went through different phases of fame, and each rises you further into isolation and alienation.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

For me, writing about hotels is like writing about being in a parallel universe. The sense of voyeurism, and the sense of removedness, and there are all these people silently above you and next to you.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.

My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other's self on the street - what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya!That's about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.