“But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we...”

“It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.”

“The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.”

“So now we are young still but a better sort of young.”

“Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.”

“The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.”

“I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is ...”

“[He] didnt like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.”

“[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.”

“And you asked why people always expected you to smile in photographs. And I told you it was because they hoped that in the future, there would be something to smile about”

“Many cultures accept the faulty nature of memory. They know even the photograph only gets it halfway right. They believe there is only one way to bring the dead back to life, story.”

“There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”

“Mediante la fotografa y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condicin fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusin de mi pasado.”

“Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should? ”

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another persons (or things) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, a...”