Quotes About Archives

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.

Computer scientists are the historians of computing.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

I got archives of records. I have records from when I was 17 that I still think are pretty dope.

You really have to clean up your room sometime, all these yellowed pages and scraps of paper completely covered with dust, someday no one will be able to find his way around in them.

This pervasive sense of danger has discouraged many serious scholars from visiting Japanese archives to conduct their research on the subject; indeed, I was told in Nanking that the People's Republic of China rarely permits its scholars to journey to Japan for fear of jeopardizing their physical safety.

No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate--like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history--until it degenerates into fables.

Caches of data are being recovered all the time. Why, just the other day, I heard that we now had complete texts for all three of Shakespire's plays!

There was not much interest in Sarah's life to draw researchers to the Berlin archives. Sarah, aware that she had something to hide, had led the way in shaping an image of herself as the most devoted of wives, and before her death she weeded out letters that friends, according to the custom of the day, returned to her. Her immediate survivors outdid her. They destroyed letters that even Sarah had preserved, perhaps to blur the intense unhappiness of the first decades of her marriage.

Had he not been a cop, he'd have loved to be a historian or archivist. Going over old papers, finding curiosities buried in obscure libraries.

Documents were destroyed. The archives themselves were in a shocking state after the war. They'd been ransacked by the Nazis, who burned anything that contradicted their worldview. We lost countless irreplaceable manuscripts. For instance, their insistence on an Aryan race. We had document after document proving there's no such thing. It was a construct, a myth, created hundreds of years ago and resurrected by the Nazis.

I went to the library and found lots of material about this time, about the Freedom March and what was going on down there in 1964.

we have to save the history we have. You never know what small bit of it might change your life--or change the whole world.

In 1931 Mabel bought a carton of Roberts Brothers archives, which had been thrown out as waste paper for the mills but salvaged by a book hunter. The carton contained the whole of the Dickinson publishing papers, including the draft and final contracts in 1894.

In fact, poetry has always been like archives that peoples have continually used to serve their feelings, thoughts, national identities and cultures, and it has served as a factor uniting different historical periods. Those who had lost contact with their past for a certain period found and experienced the expression of their own selves in poetry, and the were able to see their history as a whole in it.

Even when the libraries had been full of books,

The archives of the château would be of interest to you. There is some absolutely fascinating correspondence between all the most prominent figures in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. I spend many very happy hours there, living in the past," the Comtesse assured me, and I was reminded of M. de Guermantes remarking that she was an extremely cultured woman as far as literature was concerned.

As unrefined and basic as an animal's emotional equipment may be, it is not insensitive to freedom. Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.

Like many of those who document history, he also curated the images of the past he left behind.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

I had archives of everything that had happened since I hacked my governor module, but I hadn't had as much relevant experience in that time. But what I did have were thousands of hours of category mystery media, so I had a lot of theoretical knowledge that was possibly anywhere from 60 to 70 percent inaccurate shit.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

History is not a bedtime story. It is a comprehensive engagement with often obscure documents and books no longer read—books shelved in old archives, and fragile pamphlets contemporaneous with the subject under study—all of which reflect a world view not ours.