Walter Benjamin Quotes

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

We can't let the past be forgotten.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

The past is never the past. It is always present. And you better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad.

The past is what the past is.

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.

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

There are moments in history that people should be reminded of.

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water's surface, less precise but more profoundly true.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

We can not escape history.

If one does not forget one's previous experience, one can learn for the future from the past.

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

Most national holidays in most countries rest on selective memories of the past.

If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.