Archives Quotes

“Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ( “Not without the past”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Although she was a logical, practical person, she believed that in books there existed a kind of magic. Between the aging covers on these shelves, contained in tiny, abstract black marks on sheets of paper, were voices from the past. Voices that reached into the future, into Claire's own heart and mind, to tell her what they knew, what they'd learned, what they'd seen, what they'd felt. Wasn't that magic?”
― Christi Phillips, The Devlin Diary

“I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.”
― Sara Sheridan

“History wanted to be remembered. Evidence hated having to live in dark, hidden places and devoted itself to resurfacing. Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend to it.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Absolutely nothing is as important as knowing who to trust.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst, but also try to be prepared for the unexpected.”
― Radovan Kavický

“You can tell a lot about an area from its library, and I'd never discount the usefulness of town archives.”
― Hester Young, The Gates of Evangeline

“This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It’s what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that’s what interests me, and archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site.”
― John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists

“It's really fine that you found a good archivist to do the basically difficult and at times harrowing work of cleaning out old papers. I hope you keep her digging into all the old boxes as long as there is ONE left.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“Dipping into the archive is always an interesting, if sometimes unsettling, proposition. It often begins with anxiety, with the fear that the thing you want won't surface. But ultimately the process is a little like tapping into the unconscious, and can bring with it the ambivalent gratification of rediscovering forgotten selves.

Rather than making new pictures why can't I just recycle some of these old ones? Claim "found" photographs from among my boxes? And have this gesture signify "resistance to further production/consumption"? (96)”
― Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays

“Future is awesome. All we have to do now is to build it.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Theory of public goods. Theory that if I take you euro (as an elected state government) and give fifty cents back... you will be happier and I will be satisfied.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Rakovina mi po troche dáva všetko, čo vďaka nej strácam. Starch z bolesti a zo smrti, sen o nesmrteľnosti a nezraniteľnosti, radosť z voľnosti, korzet osamelosti, nerozhodnosť, úzkosť nad otázkou, či ešte dokážem ľúbiť. Oberá ma o moje ľahostajné driemoty a odmieta ich vrátiť.”
― Dežo Ursiny

“Elodie felt a familiar stirring of anticipation as she took in the sepia tones, the promise if a life awaiting rediscovery.
Part I: The Satchel > Chapter 1”
― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter

“No wonder the public persists in connecting the idea of human skin books with Nazis. It's easier to believe that objects of human skin are made by monsters like Nazis and serial killers, and not the well respected doctors the likes of whom parents want their children to become someday.”
― Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

“Prezraď mi najväčších inzerentov v tvojom obľúbenom printovom médiu a ja ti poviem, čo čítaš i čo nečítaš.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Ľudia, ktorých myšlienky sú nadčasové, zväčša nie sú typicky doboví.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Weddings are great, but they mostly end up in marriages and that is the problem.”
― Radovan Kavický

“To, že sa vám nepáči obraz v zrkadle, ktoré sa vám niekto rozhodol nastaviť, nie je problém ani zrkadla a ani toho, kto vám ho nastavil. Tvár v ňom je totiž vaša.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Let’s examine the history of Genesis I, II, and III.
There are many schools of thought on this subject, but the most predominant one is that Moses was the originator. This seems not too far-fetched, since Moses was reared in the Egyptian tradition, in a royal household, and probably had access to many religious writings and teachings now lost with the passing of the archives of Egypt, in Alexandria, Heliopolis, and Sais. Certainly the Ten Commandments were a condensation of the forty-two questions of Osiris for entering heaven. If Moses did write part of the Old Testament, he then must have had Naga tablet writings, or Egyptian interpretations of them, handed down to the Egyptians for thousands of years; and the Egyptian priesthood had knowledge of a cataclysm 11,500 years ago. Priests of Egypt are supposed to have told Solon during his ten years in Egypt (about 600 B.C.) that 9,000 years before that time there was a cataclysm which buried Atlantis beneath the ocean. Note that 9,000 + 600 B.C. + 1950 A.D. equals 11,550 years ago [, when the Younger Dryas ended].”
― Chan Thomas, The Adam & Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms

“...wars are orgies of forgetfulness. The twentieth century has archived vast catacombs, tunnels of information in which researchers get lost and in the end abandon their research, catacombs that ever fewer people enter. Stored away---forgotten. The twentieth century, a century of great tidying that ends in cleansing; the twentieth century, a century of cleansing, a century of erasure. Language perhaps remains, but it too is crumbling.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Anthropodermic books tell a complicated and uncomfortable take about the development of clinical medicine and the doctoring class, and the worst of what can come from the collision of acquisitiveness and clinical distancing.”
― Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

“Archive as if the future depends on it.”
― Lisbet Tellefsen

“I don’t know, this time it’s really difficult.”
― Mario Draghi

“Oh, he's a sweet thing and I love him so--and I love life--and everything's beautiful!”
― Cornelia Spelman

“Thus who burned Columbia still makes a difference - and Sherman didn't do it.”
― James Loewen

“Po zlom čaká príchod dobrého len zle informovaný optimista alebo naivný hlupák.”
― Radovan Kavický

“To become feminist you need just two things. First accept reality that women are still not equal & then to have an opinion and say very loudly that they should be equal.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Though necessary to the work of uncovering the past, archives are nevertheless limited and misleading storehouses of information. While at times imposing and formal enough as to seem all-encompassing in their brick, glass, and steel structures, archives only include records that survived accident, were viewed as important in their time or in some subsequent period, and were deemed worthy of preservation. These records were originally created by fallible people like you and me, who could err in their jottings, hold vexed feelings they sometimes transmitted onto the page, or consciously or unconsciously misconstrue events they witnessed. Even in their most organized form, archived records are mere scraps of accounts of previous happenings, "rags of realities" that we painstakingly stick together in order to picture past societies.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake