Daniel Libeskind Quotes

Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

I have something to say about the difference between American and European cities, but I forgot what it was. I have it written down at home somewhere.

Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness

Avery fine city; the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one city together? In a word,'tis the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built city in Britain, London excepted.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

The past is the sepulchre of our dead emotions.

But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.

I don't know their names. Their names have been erased from my memory banks. If I tried to bring 'em back, I'd get shocked.

The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark

As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.