Natasha Trethewey Quotes

Whole generations have forgotten history.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

I tend to believe that film can try to save what still can be saved, in terms of our histories, our memories. Because a lot of things are disappearing very quickly, things are changing. We are living in very quick times, and we have a new generation who basically know nothing about events 30 years ago.

A nation is the sum of its memories, and when those memories are allowed to die, it is less of a nation.

You cannot build a cultural identity without the images and sounds of your culture. Most countries in the third world - poor countries - they've lost their memories. Because everyday, films and cultural artifacts disappear. Film is also a memory - of the character and imagination of a culture.

Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.

I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.

When I was in South Africa, I went for dinner with some friends, and I knew more about their history than they did - it just hasn't been told.

Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.

This happens to a lot of kids from different backgrounds - they lose a lot of their parents' and grandparents' teachings, language and culture because they have to deal with another language and culture 24/7. By the time I was 44, I was terrible at Spanish. I was always intimidated whenever I had to speak it.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.