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.
ROLAND BARTHESThus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.
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Language is never innocent.
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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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One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
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We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
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Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
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The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
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The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
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Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
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All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
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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.
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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES