Archives Quotes

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

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

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

Historical gap is created due to missing written records.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

~ Sara Sheridan

Future is awesome. All we have to do now is to build it.

~ Radovan Kavický

Our archives are treasure troves - a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past alive.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

This seems to me absolutely one of the quintessential things about the human condition. It’s what actually distinguishes man from any other animal: living with those who have lived and the companionship of those who are no longer alive. Not necessarily the people that one knew personally, I mean the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind, this question of the company of the past, that’s what interests me, and archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site.

~ John Berger

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.
that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

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

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

~ Sara Sheridan

I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.

~ Sara Sheridan

Theory of public goods. Theory that if I take you euro (as an elected state government) and give fifty cents back... you will be happier and I will be satisfied.

~ Radovan Kavický

You can tell a lot about an area from its library, and I'd never discount the usefulness of town archives.

~ Hester Young

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

~ Sara Sheridan

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

~ Sara Sheridan