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Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

Roland Barthes

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
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

Community Family Instrument Television
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES

Emotion Light Reserve Shadow
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
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!
ROLAND BARTHES

Children Poem Poetry Reproduction Subject
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
ROLAND BARTHES

I Love You Myself Removal
The photographic image is a message without a code.
ROLAND BARTHES

Code Image Message Photography
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
Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
ROLAND BARTHES

Bliss Image Knowledge Mythology World
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fatal Identify Love Myself Oneself Wait
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
ROLAND BARTHES

Author Beginning Death Deep Writing
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHES

Patience Power Wait
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Essence Hell Heroes High Place
The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
ROLAND BARTHES

Forget Lover Memories Strain Time
Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
ROLAND BARTHES

Construction Front Physical Symbolic
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
ROLAND BARTHES

Death Ourselves Photography Return
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES

Innocent Language One Liner
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES

Interesting Language Myself Seduce Wound
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
The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fashion Time Value
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
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).
ROLAND BARTHES

Classification Desire Myself Speciality Stereotype Truth Unique
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.
ROLAND BARTHES

Beginning Known Love Myself Writing
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 BARTHES

Acknowledge Demand Depend Myself Sign Strength Strong
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
ROLAND BARTHES

Death Determination Photography Young
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
ROLAND BARTHES

Beyond Image Meaning
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES

Food Moral Rare Representation

Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

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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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