Joanna Russ Quotes

No generation can escape history.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

The collective memory of America is short.

Sometimes it's blood memory... not the blood your mother and father gave you... but that which stretches back two or three thousand years.

I think a lot of what I was taught, gathered, and learned is worth keeping. Heritage and "wisdom" and simply personal family and local history enrich the one able to tap such information. As it is I wish I had garnered more from my grandparents and parents.

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.

We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time--we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

Far too often, when we think we are frightened by mystery, the fact is that we are haunted by history.

Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountian, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.

John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories-Mother's in particular-how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale.

I believe in racial memory too. I'm sure I've got ancient African blood in me that has something to do with what I am.

To collude in the minimisation of British history on the grounds of its imagined irrelevance to our rebranded national future, or from a suspicion that it does no more than recycle patriotic pieties unsuited to a global marketplace, would be an act of appallingly self-inflicted collective memory loss.

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.

Talk to me 20 years ago and I had a complete sense of illegitimacy as an American Muslim. I felt like I wasn't authentic. But I don't understand and I don't believe or subscribe to this idea that I don't have a right to speak as a Muslim because I'm an American. Being Muslim is to accept and honor the diversity that we have in this world, culturally and physically, because that's what Islam teaches, that we are people of many tribes. I think the American Muslim experience is of a different tribe than the Saudi Muslim world, but that doesn't make us less than anyone else.

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

A nation has a soul, a spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the desire to live together and to value the common heritage.

A person without a memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without a memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.

Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.