Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring 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.

In the convulsions of the commodity economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.

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

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

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 reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.