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Without the classics, we are a tabula rasa: we have no memory. We not only open the classics to re-create the past; we also use them to calibrate the present.

— Ilan Stavans Interview (2021)

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Memory

More quotes by Ilan Stavans

Immigrant life in general is miserable, as one sees in the literature produced by those who experienced the journey.

A life in two languages is a life experienced twice.

Because you live in two or three worlds doesn't mean you don't live in any of them.

Interview (1999)

Reading a classic, I believe, ought to entail an element of foreignness...Classics are windows into an epoch, not only in content but in form.

Interview (2021)

Isn’t that the dream of democracy, to allow its dwellers to have a voice? The only way to achieve that is to allow them to appreciate the voices of the past.

Interview (2021)

All Ilan Stavans quotes →

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Women and elephants never forget an injury.

Saki Reginald (1904)

Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable.

Colin Wilson The Philosopher's Stone (1969)

To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.

Thomas Campbell

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

William James The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ilan Stavans (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.