Adrienne Rich Quotes

Remember the days of old, Think of the generations of long ago; Ask your father to recount it And your elders to tell the tale.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.

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.

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

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.

My family, they're story tellers. My mom is Irish, and my dad is Italian. In my family, we weren't allowed to watch TV while we ate - we had to sit around the table and tell stories about our day.

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

Whole generations have forgotten history.

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

What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.

My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement.

That's what the holidays are for - for one person to tell the stories and another to dispute them. Isn't that the Irish way?

Storytelling is important. Part of human continuity.

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

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

Looting has an immense impact on our ability to understand our global cultural heritage; once these objects are gone, so too is our chance of piecing together humanity's shared story.

I grew up in a very cultural household, but part of our culture is that we don't really take photos.

Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.

The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

My generation knew pretty well what happened 50 years before our birth. Now I follow all the quiz programs because they are a paramount example of the span of memory of the young generation - they are able to remember everything that happened in their life but not before.

I think that is what we do by preserving and telling our stories. If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change. So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

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