The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
ROLAND BARTHESLiterature is the question minus the answer.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
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The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
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Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
ROLAND BARTHES -
It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
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 -
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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 -
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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Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
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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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New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
ROLAND BARTHES






