The Allure of the Archives (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)

We need a language that is capable of reconstructing and deconstructing, playing with the similar as with the different.

you might be tempted to look only for the extraordinary or the clearly revealing. This is a mistake. Seemingly insignificant and unimportant details can reveal what was unspoken and outline lively forms of intelligence

taste for the strange is no better, because it deforms the way we look at the documents. What is left, at the level of the spoken words, is to set about the delicate analysis of the unusual, separating it from both the mundane and the exceptional.

Above all, the police were looking to indentify the culprits; it mattered little to them whether in the end an affair was ever fully cleared up.

it would give them the opportunity to clean up and impose some order on public spaces.

Words are windows; they will let you catch a glimpse of one or several contexts. But words can also be tangled and contradictory. They can articulate inconsistencies whose meaning is far from clear.