Date: 2000

"I was driven by local emotions into a freewheeling lateral association, or downwards in a potentially endless search for the anchor at the end of some chain of thought, or upwards into more and more denuded categories of categories."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"And then, because this search can only find arbitrary resting-places, it was the whole process, accepted with complete permissiveness, which became fundamental; its endlessness was its resting-place: thoughts seemed to radiate from and collapse into the same source, as if the whole history of a ...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"As I breathed in I could feel my consciousness expanding along a glistening spider's web of total connectedness and as I exhaled it accordioned back into the tropical richness of my body, the streams and rivers of my blood."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"My mind floated like the Bullet Train above its tracks, meeting no obstruction; everything clear."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

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)