It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

Most of my reading is rereading.