Cultural Memory Quotes

“People are the same all over the world, I imagine, people who react like that to their countries conspiracies: turning them into tales that are told, like children’s fables, and also into place in the memory or the imagination, a place where we go as tourists, to revive nostalgia or to try to find something we’ve lost.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.”
― Stant Litore, Strangers in the Land

“Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime."
Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.
Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
― Haruki Murakami