Memory and Remembrance Quotes

Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.

How many educated Americans can even remember the names of the assassinated Jesuit intellectuals of El Salvador, or would know where to find a word they wrote? The answers are revealing, particularly when we draw the striking - and historically typical - contrast to the attitudes towards their counterparts in enemy domains.

I see her in tears, that land which, once the cradle of my nation, is today its tomb.

One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?

Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.

The plays I remember are the plays I made a mistake.