Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us. - Susan Sontag

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself — it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting.

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.