W. G. Sebald Quotes

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

I hate looking backward, but every once in a while it sneaks up on you.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

I look at the past and I see myself.

We only have the past that we have. Not all of our deeds were incorrect.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

I learned from my past.

I'm not into watching stuff I did last week, let alone three or four years ago.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

I don't like to look too far back into the past.

I go back to December, turn around and make it alright I go back to December, turn around and change my own mind I go back to December all the time

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.

…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

Somewhere in the future I am remembering today.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.