The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history. Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable. Each of its lived moments becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour [order of the day] – whose day is precisely that of the Last Judgment.

We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones in the garden of knowledge.

I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals – the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names. To renew the old world – that is the collector’s deepest desire when…

…in tragedy, pagan man becomes aware that he is better than his god, but the realization robs him of speech, remains unspoken.

The Arcades Project comes to us today as a massive collection of notes on 19th century
industrial culture in Paris. One of its major interests to artists is its methodology which is fragmentary, collaged, aphoristic, and imagist. It is, in short, a philosophical project
whose structure is allegorical. Benjamin’s interest in Baudelaire had to do with the way
the poet collected the scraps of his time as a means of constructing allegories of the
Modern: “in order to express the universal, human problem of evil within the changed
context of Modern Life.” Benjamin saw in his allegorical process a dialectic that was
transformable, not only in the sense of transforming life into art but in transforming art
back into life.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.