I've always been interested in photographs, collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the poet's fascination with the randomness of collecting photographs and the stories they tell over time.
W. G. Sebald expresses a deep appreciation for photographs as artifacts of memory and experience, suggesting that their randomness in collection mirrors the unpredictability of life itself. The idea that photographs can be lost and then rediscovered highlights the transient yet enduring nature of memories, resonating with the human experience of nostalgia and the connections we draw from visual moments captured over time.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of preserving memories through photography.
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.
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.
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.
The seasons and the years came and went...and always...one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.
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.
No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
Don't worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop.
What a privilege and honour it has been to be part of seven years of magic in a tent - 'The Great British Bake Off.'
Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art
Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!
Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
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