Austerlitz Quotes

“Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another?”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions,”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine veil that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“The further you can rise above the earth the better, he said, and for that same reason he had decided to study astronomy.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“If at times some kind of self-deception nonetheless made me feel that I had done a good day’s work, then as soon as I glanced at the page next morning I was sure to find the most appalling mistakes, inconsistencies, and lapses staring at me from the paper. However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on. Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken... as if they were the mortal frames of those who lay there in that darkness.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Fue también decisivo para mis progresos en el colegio el que nunca considerase estudiar y leer como una carga. Muy al contrario, encerrado, como había estado hasta entonces, en la Biblia galesa y las homilías, me parecía ahora como si al pasar cada página se abriera otra puerta. Leía todo lo que ofrecía la biblioteca del colegio, formada de un modo totalmente arbitrario, y lo que conseguía prestado de mis profesores, libros de geografía y de historia, relatos de viajes, novelas y biografías, y me quedaba hasta la noche ante libros de consulta y atlas. Poco a poco surgió así en mi cabeza una especie de paisaje ideal, en el que el desierto arábigo, el imperio azteca, el continente antártico, los Alpes nevados, el Paso del Noroeste, la corriente del Congo y la península de Crimea formaban un solo panorama, poblado de todas las figuras correspondientes. Como en cualquier momento que quisiera, en la clase de latín lo mismo que durante el servicio religioso o en los ilimitados fines de semana, podía imaginarme en ese mundo, nunca caí en las depresiones que padecían tantos en Stower Grange.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“When they crossed the bridge and their armored cars were rolling up the Narodni a profound silence fell over the city. People turned away, and from that moment they walked more slowly, like somnambulists, as if they no longer knew where they were going. What particularly upset us, so Vera remarked, said Austerlitz, was the instant change to driving on the right. It often made my heart miss a beat, she said, when I saw a car racing down the road on the wrong side, since it inevitably made me think that from now on we must live in a world turned upside down.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Hilary could talk for hours about the second of December 1805, but nonetheless it was his opinion that he had to cut his accounts far too short, because, as he several times told us, it would take an endless length of time to describe the events of such a day properly, in some inconceivably complex form recording who had perished, who survived, and exactly where and how, or simply saying what the battlefield was lie at nightfall, with the screams and groans of the wounded and dying. In the end all anyone could ever do was sum up the unknown factors in the ridiculous phrase, "The fortunes of the battle swayed this way and that," or some similarly feeble and useless cliché. All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us: the fallen drummer by, the infantry man shown in the act of stabbing another, the horse's eye starting from its socket, the invulnerable Emperor surrounded by his generals, a moment frozen still amidst the turmoil of battle. Our concern with history, so Hilary's thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Unlike Elias, who always connected illness and death with tribulations, just punishment, and guilt, Evan told tales of the dead who had been struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life. If you had an eye for them they were to be seen quite often, said Evan. At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges. And they were usually a little shorter than they had been in life, for the experience of death, said Evan, diminishes us, just as a piece of linen shrinks when you first wash it.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Voorzover ik me herinner duurde het geruime tijd voordat ik van mijn verbazing over de onverhoopte terugkeer van Austerlitz was bekomen; in elk geval staat me nog bij dat ik, voordat ik naar hem toe ging, een tijdlang nadacht over zijn gelijkenis met Ludwig Wittgenstein die mij nu voor het eerst opviel, over de verbijsterde uitdrukking die ze beiden op hun gezicht droegen. Ik geloof dat het vooral de rugzak was, waarvan Austerlitz mij later vertelde dat hij hem vlak voordat hij was gaan studeren voor tien shilling had gekocht uit voormalige Zweedse legervoorraden in een surplus-store aan Charing Cross Road, en dat het het enige waarachtig betrouwbare in zijn leven was geweest, het was geloof ik deze rugzak die mij op het eigenlijk nogal bizarre idee bracht van een zekere lichamelijke verwantschap tussen hem, Austerlitz, en de in 1951 in Cambridge aan kanker gestorven filosoof. Ook Wittgenstein had voortdurend zijn rugzak bij zich gehad, in Puchberg en Otterthal evenzeer als wanneer hij naar Noorwegen ging of naar Kazachstan of naar zijn zusters thuis om het kerstfeest te vieren in de Alleegasse. Die rugzak, waarvan Margarete haar broer op een keer schrijft dat hij haar bijna net zo lief is als hijzelf, reisde altijd en overal met hem mee, ik geloof zelfs over de Atlantische Oceaan, op de lijnboot Queen Mary, en vervolgens van New York tot Ithaka. Als ik nu dus ergens op een foto van Wittgenstein stuit, heb ik steeds meer het gvoel dat Austerlitz mij daarop aanstaart, en als ik naar Austerlitz kijk is het alsof ik in hem de ongelukkige denker zie, die zowel in de helderheid van zijn logische gedachtengangen als in de verwarring van zijn gevoelens zat opgesloten, zo opvallend is de gelijkenis tussen die twee, in hun gestalte, in de manier waarop ze je als van achter een onzichtbare grens bestuderen, in hun slechts provisorisch ingerichte leven, in het verlangen met zo weinig mogelijk toe te kunnen, en in het onvermogen zich bezig te houden met preliminairen, dat karakteristiek was zowel voor Austerlitz als voor Wittgenstein.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyze my entire system.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Δεν νομίζω ότι καταλαβαίνουμε τους νόμους, είπε ο Άουστερλιτς, τους οποίους ακολουθεί η επιστροφή του παρελθόντος, ωστόσο έχω όλο και περισσότερο την εντύπωση ότι ο χρόνος δεν υπάρχει, υπάρχουν μόνο διάφοροι χώροι, κλεισμένοι ο ένας μέσα στον άλλο σύμφωνα με μια ανώτερη στερεομετρία, και ανάμεσά τους κυκλοφορούν οι ζωντανοί και οι νεκροί αναλόγως με τα κέφια τους, και όσο το σκέφτομαι τόσο περισσότερο πιστεύω ότι εμείς που ζούμε ακόμη είμαστε στα μάτια των νεκρών όντα μη πραγματικά, ορατά μόνο υπό συγκεκριμένες προϋποθέσεις, ανάλογα με το φωτισμό και τις ατμοσφαιρικές συνθήκες.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“When memories come back to you, you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain, and now, as I tell you this, if I close my eyes I see the two of us as it were disembodied, or, more precisely, reduced to the unnaturally enlarged pupils of our eyes, looking down from the observation platform on the Petřin Hill at the green slopes below, with the funicular railway making its way upwards like a fat caterpillar, while further out, on the other side of the city, the railway train you always “waited so eagerly to see is making its way past the row of houses at the foot of the Vyšehrad and slowly crossing the bridge over the river, trailing a white cloud of vapor”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“My mind thus gradually created a kind of ideal landscape in which the Arabian desert, the realm of the Aztecs, the continent of Antarctica, the snow-covered Alps, the North-West Passage, the river Congo, and the Crimean peninsula formed a single panorama, populated by all the figures proper to those places.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“Since my childhood and youth, he finally began, looking at me again, I have never known who I really was. From where I stand now, of course, I can see that my name alone, and the fact that it was kept from me until my fifteenth year, ought to have put me on the track of my origins, but it has also become clear to me of late why an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, has always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions and embarking on the inquiries they would have suggested to”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“And indeed, said Austerlitz after a while, to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in traveling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“he was not at all surprised by my direct approach but answered me at once, without the slightest hesitation, as I have variously found since that solitary travelers, who so often pass days on end in uninterrupted silence, are glad to be spoken to.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz