Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. – Walter Benjamin
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. – Walter Benjamin
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. – Walter Benjamin
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. – Walter Benjamin