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 BARTHESTo 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?
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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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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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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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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We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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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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Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
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I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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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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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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Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
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Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
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Language is never innocent.
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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
ROLAND BARTHES