Monday Morning with W.G. Sebald (from his novel The Rings of Saturn)

"If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea." p. 92

"We waited for the taxi beside the Holderlin pump, and by the faint light that fell from the living-room window into the well I saw, with a shudder that went to the roots of my hair, a beetle rowing across the surface of the water, from one dark shore to the other." p. 190

"It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder." p.220