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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.

Roland Barthes

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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Evidence Literature Trouble Understand
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mouth Oneself Speaking Time Tongue
Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
ROLAND BARTHES

Design Myself Reading Writing
The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
ROLAND BARTHES

Art Magic Photography Reality
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

I Love You Language Lose Myself Point
To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
ROLAND BARTHES

Body Eat Origin Sing Talk
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).
ROLAND BARTHES

Bliss Desire Language Oneself Science Writing
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHES

Culture Drawing Text
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES

Interesting Language Myself Seduce Wound
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

History Invention Photography Review
Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
ROLAND BARTHES

Desire Disappointment Pleasure Rival Truth
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Children Death Fear Mom Myself Patient Photography
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES

Emotion Light Reserve Shadow
I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.
ROLAND BARTHES

Arrival Lose Myself Time
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
ROLAND BARTHES

Age Experience Old Specific Vision
Literature is the question minus the answer.
ROLAND BARTHES

Answer Literature Question

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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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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