“If you want to undo the problem of induction, you have to observe that our impressions are not of particulate facts but of the proverbial billiard balls in motion, and a billiard ball is not something particulate, momentary.” –Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology

“Then one day I was struck by the obvious. Pistaim, of course, was the Ilongot rendition of the English ‘peacetime,’ the time before World War II.” -Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot Headhunting

“Ilongots in fact care intensely about the relative sequence of a succession of events, but these excursions into the past are meticulously mapped onto the landscape, not onto a calendar. A reader without a detailed knowledge of the local landscape and its myriad placenames would surely infer that Ilongot narrative lacks a historical dimension.”-Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot Headhunting

"To consider Katrina and its aftermath a problem of preparedness rather than one of population security is to focus political questions about the failure around a fairly circumscribed set of issues. For the purposes of disaster planning, whose key question is ‘are we prepared?’ the poverty rate and the percentage of people without health insurance are not salient indicators of readiness of the efficacy of response. Rather, preparedness emphasizes questions such as hospital surge capacity, the coherence of evacuation plans, the resilience of the electrical grid, or ways of detecting the presence of E. coli in the water supply. From the vantage of preparedness, the conditions of existence of members of the population are not a political problem.” –Andrew Lakoff, Preparing for the Next Emergency, 2007

“The actual value at any time, the market value as it is often called, is often more influenced by passing events and by causes whose action is fitful and short lived, than by those which work persistently. But in long periods these fitful and irregular causes in large measure efface one another’s influence; so that in the long run persistent causes dominate value completely.”-Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 1890

“Time, or rather the experience of it that we call memory, is like an old-fashioned Martiniquan concertina—alternatively being squeezed and pulled apart, compressing some things, stretching out others, and in the process making music.”—Richard Price, The Convict and the Colonel

“Restored behavior is living behavior treated as a film director treats a strip of film. These strips of behavior can be rearranged or reconstructed; they are independent of the causal systems (social, psychological, technological) that brought them into existence… Performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nth time. Performance is ‘twice behaved behavior.’”-Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” –Walter Benjamin

“Memory is an action: essentially, it is the action of telling a story.” –Pierre Janet

“When a patient talks about these ‘forgotten’ things he seldom fails to add: ‘As a matter of fact I’ve always known it; only I’ve never thought of it.’” - Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Miracle Ice Cream
by Adrienne Rich

Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.

Take what's still given: in a room's rich shadow
a woman's breasts swinging lightly as she bends.
Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.
Late, you sit weighing the evening news,
fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,
the rest of your heart.