Gunter Grass Quotes

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

Every photo, every 'ONCE' in time is also the beginning of a story starting 'once upon a time...' Every photo is the first frame of a movie.

Just think how minimal somebody's family album is. But you start looking at one of them, and the word everybody will use is "charming." Something just happened. It's automatic, just operating a camera intelligently.

Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

I enjoy looking back on my life. I'm thinking seriously about starting to write about it.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

Photography is a form of time travel.

For many human beings, an interest in the past starts with themselves. That is, in part, a result of biology. Like other creatures, humans have a beginning and an ending, and in between lies their story.

I'm trying to grow more as a journalist and understand the story I'm photographing in order to communicate it in a better way.

I love looking back at my old pictures and pictures of my grandma and my mom and see how they expressed themselves at different parts of their lives, and it just tells an interesting story, so why not play around?

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

The stories we love best do live in us forever.

Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.

I hate to think that all my current experiences will someday become stories with no point.

I told all kinds of stories about going to Japan, about playing ball with my father... I wanted to record my life in case it was going to end soon. So, I wrote that and it was very comforting to have that practice in the afternoons in my living room. I just wrote about my life.

The next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

I wish my family had taken more pictures when I was growing up. Instead of always having to draw everything.

She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (last lines)

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

I associate times with certain music. It still is that for me. It's telling the story of our lives.

This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.