Date: 1774, rev. 1787, 1779 in English

"A secret sympathy had attached her to him from their first acquaintance; and now, after so long an intimacy, after passing through so many different scenes, the impression was engraved on her mind for ever."

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)

Date: 1774, rev. 1787, 1779 in English

"The whole force of these words fell like a stroke of thunder on the heart of the unfortunate Werter."

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832)

Date: 2001

"I also recollect now that as I went on down the tunnel which could be said to form the backbone of the fort, I had to resist the feeling taking root in my heart, one which to this day often comes over me in macabre places, a sense that with ever forward step the air was growing thinner and the w...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"[T]his is how it is described in the book Le Jardin des Plantes, in which Claude Simon descends once more into the storehouse of memories, and on page 235 begins to tell the fragmentary tale of a certain Gastone Novelli who, like Améry, was subjected to this particular form of torture."

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

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

"In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again it you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print l...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"At any rate, said Austerlitz, Gerald then moved from Cambridge to continue his work at an astrophysics research institute in Geneva, where I visited him several times, and as we walked out of the city together and along the banks of the lake I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselve...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"When Austerlitz had brought the tea tray in and was holding slices of white bread on a toasting fork in front of the blue gas flames, I said something about the incomprehensibility of mirror images, to which he replied that he often sat in this room after nightfall, staring at the apparently mot...

— 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

"Memories like this came back to me in the disused Ladies' Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station, memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie, all interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty gray light, and which seemed to go on and...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)