Walter Benjamin Memories Quotations

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

The work of memory collapses time.

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.