Quotes about Ruin

"The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what remains or returns as a specter from the moment one first looks at oneself and a figuration is eclipsed. The figure, the face, then sees its visibility being eaten away; it loses its integrity without disintegrating. For the incompleteness of the visible monument comes from the eclipsing structure of the trait, from a structure that is only remarked, pointed out, impotent or incapable of being reflected in the shadow of the self-portrait."- Jacques Derrida

"The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It is experience itself: neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of a totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything. Ruin is, rather, this memory open like an eye, or like the hole in a bone socket that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all. This, for showing you nothing at all, nothing of the all. 'For' means here both because the ruin shows nothing at all and with a view to showing nothing of the all."- Jacques Derrida

"We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings."- Alfred Jarry

"Whence the love of ruin. And the fact that the scopic pulsion, voyeurism itself, is always on the lookout for the originary ruin. A narcissistic melancholy, a memory- in mourning- of love itself. How to love anything other than the possibility of ruin? Than an impossible totality?"- Jacques Derrida

"Oh Time! the beautifier of the dead,
Adorner of the ruin, comforter
And only healer when the heart hath bled;
. . . Time, the avenger!"- Lord Byron

"We moralize among ruins."- Benjamin Disraeli

website: http://www.brynmawr.edu/visualculture/journal/t_ruins.shtml

for memory quotes: http://www.brynmawr.edu/visualculture/journal/p_benjamin.shtml