Date: 2001

"And now, whenever I see a photograph of Wittgenstein somewhere or other, I feel more and more as if Austerlitz were gazing at me out of it, and when I look at Austerlitz it is as if I see in him the disconsolate philosopher, a man locked into the glaring clarity of his logical thinking as inextr...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"Both ideas were right in a way at the time, since the new station was literally rising from the ruins of the old Liverpool Street; in any case, the crucial point was hardly this speculation in itself, which was really only a distraction, but the scraps of memory beginning to drift through the ou...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"And the sweet fragrance wafting up from the walled garden, the waxing moon already in the sky above the rooftops, the sound of church bells ringing down in the city, and the yellow façade of the tailor's house with its green balcony where Moravec, who as Vera told me had died long ago, frequentl...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"On the evening of that day, when I visited Vera for the second time in her flat in the Šporkova and she confirmed, in answer to my question, that Agáta had indeed worn sequined sky-blue shoes with her costume as Olympia, I felt as if something were shattering inside my brain."

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: March, 2007

"We don't have a 'scissors in the mind' that can trim away dissonance at will, in an effort to isolate our knowledge in actu from uncomfortable aspects of our knowledge of the world."

— Habermas, Jürgen (b. 1929)

Date: March, 2007

"This fiction [of the self] gets replaced with the image of a consciousness that hangs like a marionette from an inscrutable crisscross of strings."

— Habermas, Jürgen (b. 1929)