W. G. Sebald Quotes

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot.

Continents of memory had been lost.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

We're not really afraid to die. We're only afraid of being forgotten. We know that we'll be forgotten, and the idea is unbearable, don't you agree? As time passes we become infrequent visitors in the minds of those left behind. The ones who clear out the house & divide up the belongings. Throw away the rubbish. And forget. If we knew that every evening someone lit a candle and sat down to think – thought about is if only for a few seconds – then we could depart this earth in peace. No-one will light a candle for me. Who would do that?

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

Wars come and wars go but the world does not change: it will always forget an indebtedness which it thinks it expedient not to remember.

It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.

oblivion has been noticed as the offspring of silence.

How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness

Time's the thief of memory

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

To be forgotten, is to die a little.

One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.