W. G. Sebald Quotes

Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.

The root of the problem I have is anxiety, and it's all derived from something - I'm just going to say it, some kind of sadness. It manifests in so many different ways and it affects people differently.

Bullying made me feel insecure, alone, ugly, powerless, and hopeless at times.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

I had a terror-since September -I could tell to none-and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground-because I am afraid.

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.

Don't tell me that [broken heartstrings] hurt less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize - it does.

Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.

From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

A child of broken mind, the fear that I hide behind.

Everyone is tortured. Do you know anyone who isn't?

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

Anxiety has afflicted me all my life.

I remember one day sitting at the pool and suddenly the tears were streaming down my cheeks. Why was I so unhappy? I had success. I had security. But it wasn't enough. I was exploding inside.

The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror... Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.

I think so many people live their whole life in fear and doubt and shame.

True it is that each of us has only one life - but how many of us 'die a thousand deaths' in fear and nervousness!