Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

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.

In times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everyone will be in a situation where he has to play detective.

The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than… a collector. Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. No t that they come alive in him; it is he who comes...

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.

What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

Reside en una iluminación profana, en una inspiración materialista, antropológica,para la que el hachís, el opio, o lo que sea, puede representar la escuelapreparatoria.

still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to...

how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? … And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart...

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it,...

Truth resists being projected into the realm of knowledge.

Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?

The work of memory collapses time.

This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His...

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

What has been forgotten…. is never something purely individual.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception… as film is able to do today… And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which...

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Languages are not strangers to on another.