AnArchiveOfLongings.

I do not take credit for the photographs, quotations, illustrations, graphics or anything else that I post. // "One day I would have all the books in the world, shelves and shelves of them. I would live my life in a tower of books. I would read all day long and eat peaches. And if any young knights in armor dared to come calling on their white charges and plead with me to let down my hair, I would pelt them with peach pits until they went home." // 334 bite their tongue, and torch their dreams. // Always follow back ♥

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Marian Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close

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“Even when the longing was excruciating, it fulfilled a purpose for me: namely, the purpose of making meaning in this life. Crushes are like little treadmills of hope in the abyss. We may actually be going nowhere, but there is the sensation of forward motion — something to anticipate, a reason for being, a distraction from death and larger existential questions like ‘What is everything?’ and 'What am I doing here?’”

— Melissa Broder, from “Life without Longing,” The New York Times (9 February 2019)

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“Romantic obsession is my first language. I live in a world of fantasies, infatuations and love poems. Sometimes I wonder if the yearning I’ve felt for others was more of a yearning for yearning itself. I’ve pined insatiably and repeatedly: for strangers, new lovers, unrequited flames. While the subjects changed, that feeling always remained. Perhaps, then, I have not been so infatuated with the people themselves, but with the act of longing.”

— Melissa Broder, from “Life without Longing,” The New York Times (9 February 2019) 

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“Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic”

— Tennessee Williams, from The Glass Menagerie (New Directions, 1970)

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“Did you enter my wound from another wound?”

— Lola Ridge, from To The Many; Collected Poems of Lola Ridge; “Secrets,”

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Diane Schwemm, The Year I Turned Sixteen

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“The light That reaches you now Is I Began far off. That touches your eyes. That enters your thought. From afar. From the start.”

— Frederick Seidel, from “Faint Galaxy,” Poems 1959-2009 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009)

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“It was not his heartbeat he heard at night, but rather loneliness pacing back and forth in its empty room.”

— Greg Sellers, journal entry, “Notes from Neruda’s Ghost,” 5 July 2019

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“all of [her] is brushed with light, so much glare she seems to singe the very tissue of remembrance.”

— C.K. Williams, from “Combat,” Poems 1963-1983 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988)

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“We want to find what we seek, which is only deliverance from ourselves. This is why, finding love, we have so pure an intoxication–such great despair when we lose it. Each time the love is another planet: we fall into it, freed from the emptiness of tapping and misfortune. In fact, in love, we are no longer ourselves.”

— Georges Bataille, from Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall (SUNY Press, 2011)   

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“Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.”

— Rollo May, from Man’s Search for Himself (W. W. Norton, 1953)

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Jonathan Tropper, Everything Changes

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“Wasted with longing,”

— Amy Lowell, from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell; “In Darkness,”

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“Her proximity, the mere fact of her thereness, filled me with excitement and a mysterious sort of sorrow. Who knows the pangs that pierce […] a heart? She put her head on one side, puzzled, and amused, too, I could see, by the tongue-tied intensity of my presence before her. I must have seemed like a moth throbbing before a candle-flame, or like the flame itself, shivering in its own consuming heat.”

— John Banville, from The Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

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“How much must be forgotten out of love, How much must be forgiven, even love.”

— W. H. Auden, from “Canzone,” Collected Poems (Random House, 1976)

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Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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“Pirandello said once that we are, in reality, the juxtaposition of infinite, blurred selves. It’s so, and we can’t unblur all the selves. But we can recognize that they exist, and above all, we can let them look at things, remembering always Goethe’s saying that, of all the things that we do, that we can do, the nicest of all is just to stand and look. From the moment that one pays continuous attention to anything, no matter what it is–a leaf, a nail–whatever is being regarded becomes a world in itself, mysterious, imposing, unspeakably magnified and inexhaustibly fertile in possibilities. Once you have begun to do this, you have entered into the kingdom of the Other, recognizing its otherness, and wanting to learn from it. The feeling that you get is that the world, and each aspect of it, is a mystery, is unfathomable, and that it glows against the background of universal darkness with a kind of strange and even magical light, both utterly meaningful and utterly meaningless, as the universe itself is.”

— James Dickey, from “The Kingdom of the Other: On seeing what is to be seen,” Oxford American (Spring 2018)