46 quotes found
“The work of memory collapses time.”
“History is written by the victors.”
“Languages are not strangers to on another.”
“That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.”
“All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.”
“Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.”
“The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”
“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.”
“Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.”
“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”
“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”
“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”
“The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.”
“There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.”
“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach hi...”
“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”
“What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way t...”
“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the emergency situation in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that...”
“Every line we succeed in publishing today - no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it - is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness.”
“The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forg...”
“What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.”
“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize how it really was. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.”
