One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gรฉmissements de dรฉsespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.
W. G. SebaldOnly in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.
W. G. SebaldI felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind.
W. G. SebaldAnd so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.
W. G. Sebald