Marc Augé > Quotes

“We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful.”
― Marc Augé, Oblivion

“Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a world about which we know almost nothing? They return more frequently than comets do, in fact. It would be better, then, to speak of them as loyal satellites, a bit capricious and therefore even troublesome: they appear, disappear, suddenly come back to badger our memory at night when we cannot sleep. But, little as we may care to, as our hearts tell us to, we can also observe them at will, coldly, scrutinize their shadows, colors, and relief. Only, they are dead stars: from them we shall never grasp anything other than the certainty that we have already seen them, examined them, questioned them without really understanding the laws that the line of their mysterious orbits obeyed.”
― Marc Augé, Oblivion

“Le métro relie des points algébriques, des lieux et des êtres.”
― Marc Augé, Le Métro Revisité

“La ciudad se descentra como se descentran las viviendas y los hogares con la televisión y el ordenador y como se descentrarán los individuos cuando los móviles sean además ordenadores y televisores. Lo urbano se extiende por todas partes, pero hemos perdido la ciudad y al mismo tiempo nos perdemos de vista a nosotros mismos. Ante este panorama, es posible que a la bicicleta le corresponda un papel determinante: ayudar a los seres humanos a recobrar la conciencia de sí mismos y de los lugares que habitan invirtiendo, en lo que corresponde a cada uno, el movimiento que proyecta a las ciudades fuera de sí mismas. Necesitamos la bicicleta para ensimismarnos en nosotros mismos y volver a centrarnos en los lugares en que vivimos.”
― Marc Augé, Il bello della bicicletta

“Nostalgia or the height of bad faith: when its target is time, it performs a ruthless selection; forgetfulness is its secret and particularly effective weapon, a sharp knife that cuts ever deeper into the layers of memory and invents a past that never existed.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“Instead we find ourselves confronted with a fluid, composite mass where, among certain factual elements in our memories, which are also the memories of our hopes, expectations, and disappointments, there are a few holes that give a strange inconsistency to the days past, an awareness of external constraints of all kinds that weighed on our lives to the point of making us sometimes doubt that they were really ours. And finally there is the premonition that our future will not follow in an orderly way from our present any more than our present has from our past, which precedes but escapes it. In short, exactly the opposite of a curriculum vitae or a career plan, and sometimes the shadow of a doubt about our singular, individual identity.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“something that locates them at a distance from aging and the passing time:”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“the expression “beyond age” is meant simply to apply to the multiplicity of times present in each of us at every instant”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“a form of waiting that, depending on the circumstances, can resemble fascination, terror, curiosity, or hope.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“to be old is to be alive, and the signs of age are also the signs of life.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“to fix oneself in time”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“The old” corresponded to a social class, a bit like “the young” does today.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“tell me how you age, and I will tell you what you were.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“do as Michel Leiris does in Manhood, that is, to push the detail of that snapshot to the extreme and without mercy, making it more faithful and more severe than any simple photo ID.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“The ages of life can be evoked independently from the progression that advancing age implies, by means of anticipation, which lays out a future, or memory, which recreates the past, and in any case, by letting the imagination play with time.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“Writing plays the role of ritual when ritual is effective and manages to give those participating or attending the feeling that it reopens time.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“Sólo el reconocimiento de la igualdad permite asociar la libertad de cada uno a la fraternidad de todos, el individuo a la relación, bajo su forma plenamente realizada. Hay”
― Marc Augé, El antropólogo y el mundo global

“I age, therefore I live. I have aged, therefore I am.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“it enhances the mixture of presence and escape that constitutes his “ecstasies,”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“the long years with no more shared adventures, in which age makes itself felt more heavily and in which, without the author’s romantic ingenuity, forgetfulness might have consumed everything, or nearly so.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“a relationship with time that removes all relevance from the distinction between memory and forgetting, something like a rediscovery or, as in the case of the ritual when it is successful, a renewal.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“Thus in the plural use of the word “age” there is an element of optimism, in sharp contrast to its use in the singular, which identifies it with an inevitability, a fate with no future”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“giving life back to an adolescent who would otherwise disappear forever:”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“Time is a freedom, age a constraint. The cat, apparently, does not know this constraint.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“Nor did I ever forget the distress signals which my adolescent self sent out to the older woman who was afterward to absorb me, body and soul. Nothing, I feared, would survive of that girl, not so much as a pinch of ashes. I begged her successor to recall my youthful ghost, one day, from the limbo to which it had been consigned.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“The writing of autobiography or memoir is comparable to the effect of time on ruins: it works by means of subtraction and selection.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“Are time and patience still virtues?”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“thus frame the evocation of a nonlinear time in which the after can be richer and more precise than the before, a time that remains in the face of time that passes, a time that provides pleasure and happiness.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“The stereotype of the bourgeois couple to which the motif of the ages of life corresponds becomes a well-oiled machine: each generation pushes the next one toward the exit.”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age

“Could I but end my days in this charming isle, without evermore stirring from it, or seeing a single inhabitant of the continent, who could remind me of all those calamities which have for so many years united to overwhelm me!…”
― Marc Augé, Everyone Dies Young: Time Without Age