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 BARTHESWhere you are tender, you speak your plural.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Why is it better to last than to burn?
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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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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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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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?
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Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
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I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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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.
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The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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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.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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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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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
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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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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
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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.
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Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
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To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
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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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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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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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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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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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Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or “filiation”), the Text is without a source – the “author” a mere “guest” at the reading of the Text.
ROLAND BARTHES