W. G. Sebald Quotes

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

Sometimes, America, when something's too bad, we don't want to look at it. We want to turn our head.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

If I have something I like to forget, then I forget it.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

I think the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It's actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what's killing us.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

Between knowing and not knowing is not wanting to know.

Though I had an idea of what was going on - I purposely didn't see it.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist.

None so blind, so deaf, as those that will not hear, that will not see.

The human race's favorite method for being in control of facts is to ignore them.

I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!

Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.

There's none so blind as they that won't see.

Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.

I am always amazed by people who know something is wrong but still insist on ignoring it, as if that will somehow make it go away. They spare themselves the confrontation, but end up boiling in resentment anyway.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

The only the way that you can live and function without seeing the facts in front of you is to put yourself in a constant state of denial.

I don't want to live in a world where I just kind of play on my naïveté - well if I don't know it, then it doesn't exist.

And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

The truth. Men will blind themselves with hot irons, rather than face it.

The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth.