I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHESHe who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES -
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
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 -
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES -
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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.
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 -
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
ROLAND BARTHES -
It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
ROLAND BARTHES -
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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 BARTHES -
Every exploration is an appropriation.
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 -
Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
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 -
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES -
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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.)
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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
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The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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