W. G. Sebald Quotes

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

I don't believe in the afterlife, so I do think when somebody passes, it's worthy of note.

I've dealt with losing close ones before, and I've been around friends that have lost friends at a young age. I think it's important to think about - not necessarily death, but about life and think about where you're going and how you want to be remembered and the legacy you want to leave.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

The paradox is, I can't miss the good things about my father while he is alive, but I will of course miss him... when he is dead.

When I was a kid, I would fantasize about my own funeral.

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart.

They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

It's too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate / But it's too soon to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb.

The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams

When a man has died, he wants you to know about it.

Remember me when I am gone away, gone far away into the silent land.

When I die, remember that what you knew of me is with you always. What is buried is only the shell of what was. Do not regret the shell, but remember the man. Remember the father.

With the tears a Land hath shed. Their graves should ever be green.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.