Archives Quotes

“Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ( “Not without the past”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library”
― Carl Sagan

“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Although she was a logical, practical person, she believed that in books there existed a kind of magic. Between the aging covers on these shelves, contained in tiny, abstract black marks on sheets of paper, were voices from the past. Voices that reached into the future, into Claire's own heart and mind, to tell her what they knew, what they'd learned, what they'd seen, what they'd felt. Wasn't that magic?”
― Christi Phillips, The Devlin Diary

“I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.”
― Sara Sheridan

“How much knowledge had been lost because no one wrote it down?”
― Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop

“Absolutely nothing is as important as knowing who to trust.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst, but also try to be prepared for the unexpected.”
― Radovan Kavický

“It's really fine that you found a good archivist to do the basically difficult and at times harrowing work of cleaning out old papers. I hope you keep her digging into all the old boxes as long as there is ONE left.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“Dipping into the archive is always an interesting, if sometimes unsettling, proposition. It often begins with anxiety, with the fear that the thing you want won't surface. But ultimately the process is a little like tapping into the unconscious, and can bring with it the ambivalent gratification of rediscovering forgotten selves.

Rather than making new pictures why can't I just recycle some of these old ones? Claim "found" photographs from among my boxes? And have this gesture signify "resistance to further production/consumption"? (96)”
― Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays

“Rakovina mi po troche dáva všetko, čo vďaka nej strácam. Starch z bolesti a zo smrti, sen o nesmrteľnosti a nezraniteľnosti, radosť z voľnosti, korzet osamelosti, nerozhodnosť, úzkosť nad otázkou, či ešte dokážem ľúbiť. Oberá ma o moje ľahostajné driemoty a odmieta ich vrátiť.”
― Dežo Ursiny

“Anthropodermic books tell a complicated and uncomfortable take about the development of clinical medicine and the doctoring class, and the worst of what can come from the collision of acquisitiveness and clinical distancing.”
― Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

“No wonder the public persists in connecting the idea of human skin books with Nazis. It's easier to believe that objects of human skin are made by monsters like Nazis and serial killers, and not the well respected doctors the likes of whom parents want their children to become someday.”
― Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin

“Archive as if the future depends on it.”
― Lisbet Tellefsen

“Prezraď mi najväčších inzerentov v tvojom obľúbenom printovom médiu a ja ti poviem, čo čítaš i čo nečítaš.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Ľudia, ktorých myšlienky sú nadčasové, zväčša nie sú typicky doboví.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Weddings are great, but they mostly end up in marriages and that is the problem.”
― Radovan Kavický

“To, že sa vám nepáči obraz v zrkadle, ktoré sa vám niekto rozhodol nastaviť, nie je problém ani zrkadla a ani toho, kto vám ho nastavil. Tvár v ňom je totiž vaša.”
― Radovan Kavický

“This basic asymmetry with respect to archives is a reflection of the asymmetry between the two sides. While one side, operating through a modern nation-state, has used its documentary and other resources to produce a version of its history that has subtly shaped the way the world sees the conflict, a version that is now ironically being undermined from within via use of these same resources, the production of a standard “official” Palestinian narrative was never really possible on the other side.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

“Thus who burned Columbia still makes a difference - and Sherman didn't do it.”
― James Loewen

“Po zlom čaká príchod dobrého len zle informovaný optimista alebo naivný hlupák.”
― Radovan Kavický

“To become feminist you need just two things. First accept reality that women are still not equal & then to have an opinion and say very loudly that they should be equal.”
― Radovan Kavický

“Though necessary to the work of uncovering the past, archives are nevertheless limited and misleading storehouses of information. While at times imposing and formal enough as to seem all-encompassing in their brick, glass, and steel structures, archives only include records that survived accident, were viewed as important in their time or in some subsequent period, and were deemed worthy of preservation. These records were originally created by fallible people like you and me, who could err in their jottings, hold vexed feelings they sometimes transmitted onto the page, or consciously or unconsciously misconstrue events they witnessed. Even in their most organized form, archived records are mere scraps of accounts of previous happenings, "rags of realities" that we painstakingly stick together in order to picture past societies.”
― Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Some historians, by prioritising accuracy of information and parading their attentiveness, diligence, and industry, emphasised only the objective of factual knowledge which might prove detrimental to their scholarly creativity, empathy, and synthetic power as well as their aesthetic judgement and broader understanding.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), p. 16.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“The tide of nineteenth-century whig orthodoxy – with its unequal emphasis on constitutional history – subsided, in the mid-twentieth century, to reveal new approaches to History. In the Stubbsian realm of later-medieval political history, for instance, this tide’s retreat enabled the advance of waters which emphasised personalities and the importance of political connections and patronage networks.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), pp. 18–19.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“Description may require the study of individual documents which thereby stimulates examination of informational value: those actors, factors, or features populating the documentary landscape.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), pp. 30–1.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“The sphere of ‘historical research’ does not readily or exactly correspond with that of ‘archival practice’ but the notion that even if a single component of the latter is omitted from the former that that then validates the profession’s collective defenestration of all issues historical fails to appreciate the complexity of all arguments.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), p. 41.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“A view of archivists as historians’ handmaidens accepts subservience, infers disciplinary subordination, and implies professional inferiority, which does not realise the scale and extent of archivists’ true accumulated expertise. Consequently, if we invert the proposition to pose not whether historians make better archivists but whether archivists make better historians, it is possible to consider not whether archivists should be scholars and engage in historical research but whether the realm of historical scholarship should incorporate archivists and archival activities.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), p. 46.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“To be looked at, to be seen, however fleetingly, is to exist.”
― Ilana Masad, Beings

“There are many ways to be seen, and the Archivist firmly believes in the importance of witnessing the past through the detritus it leaves behind, more or less preserved.”
― Ilana Masad, Beings