Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
ROLAND BARTHESThe book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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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.
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We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
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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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Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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Why is it better to last than to burn?
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The photographic image is a message without a code.
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To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
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We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
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Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
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To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
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Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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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.
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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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Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
ROLAND BARTHES