Quotes About Memory

There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

Most of my reading is rereading.

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.

The problem isn't that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs.

But the past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulation: that is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.

To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking.

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence… a way of being fully human.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

El acto fotográfico, un modo de certificar la experiencia, es también un modo de rechazarla: cuando se confina a la búsqueda de lo fotogénico, cuando se convierte la experiencia en una imagen, un recuerdo. El viaje se transforma en una estrategia para acumular fotos. La propia actividad fotográfica es tranquilizadora, y mitiga esa desorientación general que se suele agudizar con los viajes.

El fotógrafo saquea y preserva, denuncia y consagra a la vez.

The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs. This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding, and remembering.

The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads - as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world.

The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor--all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.

Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together.