Archives Quotes

• Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

  Sara Sheridan

  Real, People, Live For Today

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• Archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information.

  Taryn Simon

  Motivation, Inspiration, Information

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• There’s a level at which words are spirit and paper is skin. That’s the fascination of archives. There’s still a bodily trace.

  Susan Howe

  Skins, Fascination, Paper

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• I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.

  Ken Burns

  Thinking, Library, Done

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• Everyone keeps asking you for pictures, and after a while you get tired of that. I always say, They are in the archives.

  Annie Leibovitz

  Tired, Asking

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• Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).

  Michel-Rolph Trouillot

  Silence, Historical, Finals

  Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2015). “Silencing the Past (20th anniversary edition): Power and the Production of History”, p.26, Beacon Press

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• Man's history has been graven on the rock of Egypt, stamped on the brick of Assyria, enshrined in the marble of the Parthenon-it rises before us a majestic presence in the piled up arches of the Coliseum-it lurks an unsuspected treasure amid the oblivious dust of archives and monasteries-it is embodied in all the looms of religions, of races, of families.

  Charles Thomas Newton

  Science, Men, Race

  Charles Thomas Newton (2010). “Essays on Art and Archaeology”, p.1, Cambridge University Press

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• Language is the archives of history.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  History, Historical, Language

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.457, Library of America

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• My library is an archive of longings.

  Susan Sontag

  Inspirational, Book, Reading

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.572, Macmillan

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• The university is the archive of the Western mind, it's the keeper of the Western culture, ... the guardian of our heritage, the teacher of our teachers, ... the dwelling place of the free mind.

  Adlai E. Stevenson

  Teacher, Science, Dwelling Place

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• It’s important to have relationships with the people at the archives.

  Shola Lynch

  People, Important

  "Attention, Documentary Filmmakers: Here Are 9 Tips for Finding and Securing the Archival Material You Need" by Paula Bernstein, www.indiewire.com. November 20, 2013.

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• Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that

  James Neil Hollingworth

  Courage, Fear, Cancer

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• People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.

  Errol Morris

  People, Historical, Different

  Interview with Nick Poppy, www.believermag.com. April 2004.

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• if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it

  Cory Doctorow

  Email, Knows, Ifs

  Cory Doctorow (2011). “Context”, p.50, Tachyon Publications

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• Online media is the future, and younger feminists are already instrumental in using social media and multi-media platforms on the web to document street harassment, archive and critique the media, and create art.

  Jennifer Baumgardner

  Art, Media, Feminist

  Source: therumpus.net

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• As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods [of judicial writing] which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.

  Benjamin Cardozo

  Memories, Writing, Past

  "Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses". Book by Benjamin N. Cardozo, 1931.

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• For inspiration you go to the archives, you go to things of the past, but you still need to be contemporary for today. You can never forget the time you're living in because the past is the past and it will never come back.

  Nicki Minaj

  Inspiration, Past, Needs

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• You've traveled up ten thousand steps in search of the truth. So many days in the archives, copying, copying. The gravity of the Tang and the profundity of the Sung make heavy baggage. Here! I've picked you a bunch of wild flowers. Their meaning is the same but they're much easier to carry.

  Hsu Yun

  Spiritual, Flower, Copying

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• ‎W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is--and always will be--ourselves.

  Ian Mortimer

  Country, Mean, Past

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• With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Mean, Creating

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.112, Penguin

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• A sociologist without an archive is like a person without a memory.

  Raisa Gorbacheva

  Memories, Sociologists, Persons

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• What's an archive, son? Is that anything like a closet?

  Redd Foxx

  Son, Closets

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• Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

  Jill Lepore

  Generations, Mouths, Down And

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• The dead cannot speak. But hitherto unknown information has emerged from the confidential archives of the Syrian presidency and foreign ministry, published in a new book by Bouthaina Shaaban, who spent ten years as Hafez's interpreter and is still an adviser to his son Bashar.

  Robert Fisk

  Book, Son, Years

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• Healing requires far more of us than just the participation of our intellectual and even our emotional resources. And it certainly demands that we do more than look backwards at the dead-end archives of our past. Healing is, by definition, taking a process of disintegration of life and transforming into a process of return to life.

  Caroline Myss

  Life, Healing, Past

  Caroline Myss (2009). “Defy Gravity: Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason”, p.16, Hay House, Inc

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