Marcel Proust, From A Letter Featured In The Selected Letters Of Marcel Proust

Freud said that we endlessly repeat past hurts, forever re-enacting the same patterns in a futile attempt to patch the un-healable wound. This, more than anything, is the terror of the personal, digital archive: not that it reveals some awful act from the past, some old self that no longer stands for us, but that it reminds us that who we are is in fact a repetition, a cycle, a circular relation of multiple selves to multiple injuries. It’s the self as a bundle of trauma, forever acting out the same tropes in the hopes that we might one day change.

Navneet Alang, "Terror of the Archive"

I would rather be whole than good

- Carl Jung

I do not know the name of the feeling that I have for you. But it is a special tenderness, something I have never felt until now, not for anyone.

— Gustave Flaubert in correspondence with George Sand; Croisset, 12 November 1866, Monday night, from Selected Letters

Marta Orlowska

— Rebecca Tamás, from “Witch.”

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

I love him in the way you love a lighthouse

From a distance

Not expecting warmth

But grateful for the shape of his light

I wrote him into my days

The echo of a soul lesson coming back around

I will meet him in the Center of a life

I already started to build without him

London, 1949. source