“Memory is the finest index”–Menahem Zulay (quoted in Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza)

“If, with Cynthia Ozick, we think of history as ‘what we make from memory,’ then these [Geniza] scholars have quite literally been making history by re-remembering it, by putting it back together syllable by syllable under the intense pressure of powerfully informed and at times visionary imaginations… the great historian Yosef Haim Yerushalmi understood as well as anyone the complex role that memory plays in history (how memory both is and isn’t the finest index) and spoke often of the importance of the historical ‘olfactory sense’–one that allows scholars, and also writers, ‘to sniff out connections.'””–Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole

“Memory is what we are ultimately made of. That memory needs an organization that comes from our personal vision – eyes with thoughtful filtering lenses, ears with our own frequency, and finally, brains of Velcro tuned to our personal interest connections” – Richard Saul Wurman