I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?
W. G. SebaldIt makes oneโs head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds
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. SebaldHow I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.
W. G. SebaldOne 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. Sebald