Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
Walter BenjaminWhat we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
Walter BenjaminLike ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.
Walter BenjaminThis is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin