Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
ROLAND BARTHESWe can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.
ROLAND BARTHES -
It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
ROLAND BARTHES -
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES -
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Every exploration is an appropriation.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
ROLAND BARTHES -
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought?
ROLAND BARTHES -
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
ROLAND BARTHES -
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
ROLAND BARTHES -
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
ROLAND BARTHES






