At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection.

Arendt is describing Walter Benjamin during the 1930s, the decade of his exile and precarious life after the Nazi seizure of power. Benjamin lived largely in Paris and moved through a network of émigré intellectuals, surviving on small stipends and intermittent writing while continuing his intense reading and note-taking. Arendt, who knew Benjamin and later became one of his most important posthumous champions, evokes his habit of carrying small black notebooks in which he copied striking passages—his “pearls” and “coral.” The image belongs to Arendt’s memorial-essay portrait of Benjamin, written after his death in 1940 and published as part of her effort to introduce and contextualize his work for postwar readers.

The passage presents Benjamin as a collector whose medium is quotation. Rather than treating citations as mere scholarly apparatus, he gathers them as precious objects—“pearls” and “coral”—salvaged from the sea of daily life and reading. Arendt suggests that this practice was not incidental but “characteristic”: Benjamin’s thinking proceeds by montage, juxtaposition, and the revelatory power of fragments. The notebooks also imply a social dimension: he “read from them aloud” and “showed them around,” turning private excerpting into a shared cabinet of curiosities. In Arendt’s portrait, quotation becomes both a method of knowledge and a way of preserving value under conditions of historical catastrophe.