Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

But where are the snows of yester year?

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

A tale begun in other days, When summer suns were glowing - A simple chime, that served to time The rhythm of your rowing - Whose echoes live in memory yet, Though envious years would say 'forget.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul You live again in time, slender and silent.

When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.

One has the impression that something is stirring inside [photographs] - it is as if one can hear little cries of despair, gémissements de désespoir... as if the photographs themselves had a memory and were remembering us and how we, the surviving, and those who preceded us, once were.