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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. "
W. G. Sebald
Memory
Chance
Lead
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" To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. "
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Look
Chance
Memory
" Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there. "
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Hold
I Feel
Feel
" 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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Mine
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" I am what I am. "
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I Am What I Am
Am
" Where I grew up, in a remote village at the back of a valley, the old still thought the dead needed attending to - a notion so universal, it's enscribed in all religions. If you didn't, they might exact revenge upon the living. "
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You
Thought
" Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether. "
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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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Dark
Time
School
" 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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Like
Meaning
Over
" When I was a boy, I'd hide under the kitchen table and wind string around the chairs. I have a sense now that I am pulling on those threads. The more I pull, the more it comes unraveled. "
W. G. Sebald
Boy
Wind
Now
" I cannot get over the fact that I was born in 1944. I want to find out as much as I can about that year. "
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I Can
Find
Born
" 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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Small
Father
Small Town
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
People
Years
Small
" Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp. "
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Only
Opening
Film
" The writing I do makes great demands on translators. "
W. G. Sebald
Demands
Writing
Makes
" Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German. "
W. G. Sebald
Odd
Piece
Small
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Writing
Events
Book
" 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. "
W. G. Sebald
Language
Yourself
Trust
" The longer I carry on, the more difficult writing seems to get. "
W. G. Sebald
More
Carry
Seems
" I came from anonymity, and I will continue to write as a private pursuit. "
W. G. Sebald
Anonymity
Write
Will
" My father was not really a presence for me. He was away; he was in the German army. "
W. G. Sebald
Me
Army
Away
" Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time. "
W. G. Sebald
Experience
Loss
Time
" Up until the 17th century, Germany was far more advanced, but then everything devastated by the 30 Years War began to fall apart... The culture is not innocent. "
W. G. Sebald
Culture
War
Innocent
" I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position. "
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Position
Moral
Think
" There is a beauty in nature and culture that we no longer have access to. Those things you can't forget, you embroider... The further you tell, the further you travel from truth, which means, of course, that literature is a lie. "
W. G. Sebald
Culture
Beauty
Truth
" I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business. "
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Way
Business
Through
" 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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Bad Day
Past
You
" 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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Years
History
People
" 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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Kind
Seem
Places
" 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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Trials
You
Talk
" 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