The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flรขneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
Walter BenjaminThe more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
Walter BenjaminReminiscences, 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.
Walter Benjamin