Elie Wiesel Quotes

The intent to preserve and capture something is very different from the urge to share, but they had become intertwined.

Taking photos is a form of collecting.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

All of our records seem to capture a certain period of time for us.

I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

Poetry isn't an efficient tool for preserving experience, any more than it's an efficient mode of communication, but who says that it should be efficient?

I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist.

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

Things written, remain.

I write in order to bear witness to life.

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

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.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

I've always been able to recount things, and I have a really good memory about dialog and what people have said before and this and that.

You can hear my opinion on various subjects, but telling my story is the most authentic thing I can do. There's nothing more powerful I can share with an audience.

I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.

What soccer and coaching gave me was sort of a stage.

If I'm ever having a good time, I'll write about it so I'll remember it.

Words are powerful. The tongue is powerful. And when you write it down, and record it, and press it up, it's 100 million times more powerful. It's important to utilize our tongue to help people.

I've always subscribed to an old Chinese proverb that the palest ink is better than the best memory.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Music, at the end of the day, is communicating something - emotion, a feeling, a rite of passage, where you are in life.

Writing isn't letters on paper. It's communication. It's memory.