Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter BenjaminIt is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
Walter BenjaminThe illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
Walter BenjaminUncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.
Walter BenjaminHe 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.
Walter Benjamin