I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.
ROLAND BARTHESThe book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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Every exploration is an appropriation.
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Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
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A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.
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He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
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Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.
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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.
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The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
ROLAND BARTHES