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Quote by Walter Benjamin

“The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.”

Quote by Walter Benjamin

Work

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

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Author

Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin, born on July 15, 1892, and died on September 26, 1940, was a prominent German literary critic whose works profoundly influenced 20th-century literary criticism and cultural theory. more

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“Let's not let this be your life tonight," he says. "Let's get back in the car and pretend we're driving away because we want to... not because we need to. We can pretend I'm taking you somewhere amazing... somewhere you've always wanted to go. You can snuggle up to me and we can talk about how excited we are and we'll talk about everything we'll do when we get there. We can talk about the important stuff later. But tonight... let's not let this be your life.”

“We deliberately forget because forgetting is a blessing. On both an emotional level and a spiritual level, forgetting is a natural part of the human experience and a natural function of the human brain. It is a feature, not a bug, one that saves us from being owned by our memories. Can a world that never forgets be a world that truly forgives?”