"Lieux de mémoire are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete and sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration. Indeed they are lieux in three senses of the word - material, symbolic, and functional. Even an apparently purely material site, like [a garbage dump], becomes a lieu de mémoire only if the imagination invests it with a symbolic aura" (Pierre Nora, Between Memory an History: Les Lieux de Mémoire)

Les Lieux de Mémoire: "Our interest in lieux de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn – but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory...." (Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History", trans. Marc Roudebush)