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 BARTHESThe new is not a fashion, it is a value.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
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I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
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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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The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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.
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I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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Why is it better to last than to burn?
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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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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
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Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
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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?
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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
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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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Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
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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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We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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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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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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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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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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Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
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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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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?
ROLAND BARTHES