Natasha Trethewey Quotes

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

A nation's life is about as long as its reverential memory.

We have a national memory in this country of about 7 minutes.

We can't let the past be forgotten.

I tend to believe that film can try to save what still can be saved, in terms of our histories, our memories. Because a lot of things are disappearing very quickly, things are changing. We are living in very quick times, and we have a new generation who basically know nothing about events 30 years ago.

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.

A nation that forgets its past has no future.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

There's no relationship to the narrative anymore. People want their own interpretation of history. We're compartmentalizing, forgetting what came directly before, like it's not a big deal. That, to me, is a crime.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

You can’t just wave a magic wand and make our history go away..

The American war of 1861-65 is recent enough to be embedded still in cultural memory.

Our national future does not demand we revise and malign our past.

Memory in America suffers amnesia.