Photography, alone of the arts, seems perfected to serve the desire humans have for a moment - this very moment - to stay.
People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.
He who forgets will be destined to remember.
Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.
I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive.
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
I have tried to keep memory alive... I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging.
Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.
A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.
Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.
Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.
Remembering is a necessary rebuke to those who say the Holocaust never happened or has been exaggerated.
The only way to kill death is through photography.
I handwrite out all my lines. I like to see my handwriting, and I like to keep my notes over time.
I've always been a bit of a documentarian.
I have always had a great interest in visually documenting the past.
Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need.
Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting
I'm sometimes mystified by people who keep diaries. I never thought of my existence as being that important.
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.
I pluck up the good lissome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory.
What you remember saves you.
