38 Quotes by Michel de Certeau

More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.

An absence of meaning opens a gap in time.

The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual.

The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path.

The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.

Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.

A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.