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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

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 lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
ROLAND BARTHES

Forget Lover Memories Strain Time
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Escape Present Way
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Hard Time Ourselves Suffering
A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
ROLAND BARTHES

Description Photograph Plural
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
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
ROLAND BARTHES

Forget Ourselves Settle
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Ideas Institution Meaning Official Popular Repeat Structure
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Living Myself Old Photography Sound
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
ROLAND BARTHES

Body Desire Life Love Myself
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
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Experience Fashion Past Present Refusal
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Myself Suffering
Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
ROLAND BARTHES

Construction Front Physical Symbolic
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES

Innocent Language One Liner
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
ROLAND BARTHES

Failure Obligation Reading Story

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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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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Popular Authors

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