Elie Wiesel Quotes

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

Remembrance is a form of meeting.

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

I think it's good that we're sometimes reminded of important events in history.

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.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

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

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.

This is the place. Stand still, my steed,- Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been.

I'm surprised by how much I remember.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.