I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.

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.

Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

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.