Quote

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Even
Space
Appear
Commemoration
Made
Talking
Flow
Discontinuity
Years
Moment
Eternal
Extensive
Always
Stuff
Months
Recollection
Time
Makes
Ones
Autobiography
Life
Moments
Amount
Continuous
Form
Cases
Sequence
Discontinuities
May
Strange
Fleeting
Reminiscences

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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
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Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
Walter Benjamin