I’ll tell you something banal.We’re emotional illiterates. And not only you and I—practically everybody, that’s the depressing thing. We’re taught everything about the body and about agriculture in Madagascar and about the square root of pi, or whatever the hell it’s called, but not a word about the soul. We’re abysmally ignorant, about both ourselves and others.

— Ingmar Berman, from the screenplay Persona (AB Svensk, 1966)

Later that Night  -   Mattias Härenstam, 2014.

I’m asking You God, to give me what You have left.
Give me those things that others never ask of You.
I don’t ask You for rest, or tranquillity.
Not that of the spirit, the body, or the mind.
I don’t ask You for wealth, or success, or even health.
All those things are asked of You so much Lord,
that you can’t have any left to give.
Give me instead Lord what You have left.
Give me what others don’t want.
I want uncertainty and doubt.
I want torment and battle.
And I ask that You give them to me now and forever Lord,
so I can be sure to always have them,
because I won’t always have the strength to ask again.
But give me also the courage, the energy,
and the spirit to face them.
I ask You these things Lord, because I can’t ask them of myself.

Written by Lieutenant Andre Zirnheld, circa 1942
Translated from the original French by Robert Petersen

Andrew Wyeth - Distant Thunder, 1961

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It’s frightening how many people and things there are in a man’s past that have stopped moving. The living people we’ve lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

No ordinary love, Sade, 1992.

Illustration from Revue des arts graphiques : Gutenberg-journal, via Paris Bibliotheques

“Some people do not know how rich they are until they experience how rich people steal from them.”

—The Gay Science, §257.