The Allure of the Archives Quotes

“The archival document is a tear in the fabric of time, an unplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“When working in the archive you will often find yourself thinking of this exploration as a dive, a submersion, perhaps even a drowning … you feel immersed in something vast, oceanic.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The complex link between the people anonymously submerged in history and the society that they belonged to.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“You realize that it is an illusion to imagine that one could ever actually reconstruct the past.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“We cannot bring back to life those whom we find cast ashore in the archives.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The inventory room is sepulchral.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The archive is a vantage point from which the symbolic and intellectual constructions of the past can be rearranged. It is a matrix that does not articulate "the" truth but rather produces, through recognition as much as through disorientation, the elements necessary to ground a discourse of truth telling that refuses lies.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“A historical narrative is a construction, not a truthful discourse that can be verified on all of its points.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The past has no unambiguous meaning, and nowhere is this clearer than in the archives.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“It is like a kaleidoscope revolving before your eyes. Pausing for an instant, it fixes the precise shapes of imagined figures, which then burst into iridescent light before coming together in different configurations. These figures are ephemeral, and the smallest movement scatters them to produce others.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“If the archive is to serve as an effective social observatory, it will only do so through the scattered details which have broken through, and which form a gap-riddled puzzle of obscure events.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“Seemingly insignificant and unimportant details can reveal what was unspoken and outline lively forms of intelligence and reasoned understandings, interwoven with broken dreams and spent desires.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“Just when you think you have finally discovered the framework underlying the way events unfolded and individuals acted, opaqueness and contradiction begin to creep in. Incongruous spaces emerge with no apparent connection to the landscape that seemed to be taking shape only a few documents earlier.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“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.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“A passion for the archives is not an exemption from its pitfalls. It would be prideful to imagine that by virtue of having spotted the traps we have eluded their grasp.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“History is never the simple repetition of archival content, but a pulling away from it, in which we never stop asking how and why these words came to wash ashore on the manuscript page.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“One must always remain vigilant and maintain enough watchful lucidity to safeguard against a lack of distance.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The trap is nothing more than this: you can become absorbed for the archives to the point that you no longer know how to interrogate them.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The archive is like a forest without clearings, but by inhabiting it for a long time, your eyes become accustomed to the dark, and you can make out the outlines of the trees.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The incompleteness of the archives coexists right alongside the abundance of documents. [...] The seeming limitlessness of the words does not entail similar limitlessness of information.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The taste for the archive is rooted in these encounters with the silhouettes of the past, be they faltering or sublime. There is an obscure beauty in so many existences barely illuminated by words.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“To feel the allure of the archives is to seek to extract additional meaning from the fragmented phrases found there. Emotion is another tool with which to split the rock of the past, of silence.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The surplus of life that floods the archive and provokes the reader, intensely and unconsciously.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The archive is an excess of meaning, where the reader experiences beauty, amazement, and a certain affective tremor.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The archives do not necessarily tell the truth, but [...] they tell of the truth.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“Taking you to a place poised somewhere between the familiar and the exotic.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“An archival manuscript is a living document; microfilm reproduction, while sometimes unavoidable, can drain the life out of it.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The archive imposes a startling contradiction: as it immerses and invades the reader, its vastness gives rise to a feeling of solitude.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives

“The physical pleasure of finding a trace of the past is succeeded by doubt mixed with the powerless feeling of not knowing what to do with it.”
― Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives