It is only for those without hope that hope is given.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

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.

We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.

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.

We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.