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Why is it better to last than to burn?

Roland Barthes

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
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHES

Culture Drawing Text
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 passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.
ROLAND BARTHES

Beyond Death Myself Pass Reality Spectacle
New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
ROLAND BARTHES

Abstraction Desert Height Man Reality
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
ROLAND BARTHES

Himself Life Reading Story
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
ROLAND BARTHES

Notable Order Photography Sophistication Value
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
ROLAND BARTHES

Confession Inflexion Lying
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
Every exploration is an appropriation.
ROLAND BARTHES

Appropriate Exploration
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
ROLAND BARTHES

Patience Power Wait
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Myself Suffering
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
ROLAND BARTHES

Literature Poet Talk Writing
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
ROLAND BARTHES

Existence Language Man Position
It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
ROLAND BARTHES

Emotional Sexuality
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES

Better Burn Evaluation Kind Love

Why is it better to last than to burn?

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Why is it better to last than to burn?

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