Jerry

“Later, Heinrich Boll suggested that such experiences of collective uprooting are at the origin of the German craving for travel: a sense of being unable to stay anywhere, a constant need to be somewhere else. In terms of social conditioning, this would make the ebb and flow of the population bombed out of their homes rather like a rehearsal for initiation into the mobile society that would form in the decades after the catastrophe.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“...he spoke of these things generally, referring to the Sardinian society of the interior. Cagliari was different; there people didn't take offense at a little nothing and didn't find evil everywhere. Maybe it was the sea air that made them freer, at least in certain respects, though not politically, because the Cagliaritani were bourgeois who never felt like fighting for anything.”
― Milena Agus, From the Land of the Moon

“This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“From the outset, the now legendary and in some respects genuinely admirable reconstruction of the country after the devastation wrought by Germany's wartime enemies, a reconstruction tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the nation's own past history, prohibited any look backward.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction