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" My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain. "
W. G. Sebald
Parents
Captain
Army
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" It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit. "
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" A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern. "
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" It would be presumptuous to say writing a book would be a sufficient gesture, but if people were more preoccupied with the past, maybe the events that overwhelm us would be fewer. "
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" Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them. "
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" If you're based in two places, on a bad day you see only the disadvantages everywhere. On a bad day, returning to Germany brings back all kinds of spectres from the past. "
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" The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. "
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" Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether. "
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" My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing. "
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" In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them. "
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" Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there. "
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" I don't want to talk about my trials and tribulations. Once you reveal even part of what your real problems might be in life, they come back in a deformed way. "
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" My father was not really a presence for me. He was away; he was in the German army. "
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" Mine is a European imagination, shaped largely by my very promiscuous reading in German, French, English and, with greater difficulty, Italian. "
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" You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist. "
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" I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business. "
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" Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say. "
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" It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer - all that preoccupation and brooding. "
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" I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him. "
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" In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form. "
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