The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.