Nino Winterbottom

“A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past--which is to say, only for the redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments…”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“There is another danger which you can scarcely hope to escape. It is the weight of the past. Not only will you esteem material objects because they are old — I am not superficial enough to reproach you for so harmless a weakness — but, more banefully, you will venerate ideas and institutions because they have remained for a long time in force; for so long a time as to appear to you absolute and unalterable. That is real atrophy of the soul. You inherit your code ready-made. That waxwork figure labelled Gentleman will be forever mopping and mowing at you… You will never wonder why you pursue a certain course of behaviour; you will pursue it because it is the thing to do. And the past is to blame for all this; inheritance, tradition, upbringing; your nurse, your father, your tutor, your public school, Chevron, your ancestors, all the gamut. Even should you try to break loose it will be in vain… though you may wobble in your orbit, you can never escape from it.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

“Now, what I call faith in this case is like something that I said about justice and the gift, something that is presupposed by the most radical deconstructive gesture. You cannot address the other, speak to the other, without an act of faith, without testimony. What are you doing when you attest to something? You address the other and ask, “believe me.” Even if you are lying, even in a perjury, you are addressing the other and asking the other to trust you. This “trust me, I am speaking to you” is of the order of faith, a faith that cannot be reduced to a theoretical statement, to a determinative judgment; it is the opening of the address to the other. So this faith is not religious, strictly speaking; at least it cannot be totally determined by a given religion. That is why this faith is absolutely universal.”
― Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, With a New Introduction

“There was something better in life than this rub­bish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . .”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice