Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
ROLAND BARTHESTo 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?
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
ROLAND BARTHES -
In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
ROLAND BARTHES -
If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a “weakness” or an “absurdity”: it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
ROLAND BARTHES -
We 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.
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All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
ROLAND BARTHES -
To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES -
Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.
ROLAND BARTHES -
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
ROLAND BARTHES -
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES -
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
ROLAND BARTHES -
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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 -
The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Literature is the question minus the answer.
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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