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He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Roland Barthes

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

Answer Hope Love Myself Question Yourself
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
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Evidence Literature Trouble Understand
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Classification Forget Language Oppression Power Speech
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
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
The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fashion Time Value
This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
ROLAND BARTHES

Absence Condition Endurance Faith Myself Survival
Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.
ROLAND BARTHES

Literature Poet Talk Writing
Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.
ROLAND BARTHES

Absence Burning Desire Object Present
I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fun Life Myself Possible Pretty Professional
The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Evil Forgiveness God Ourselves Suffering Weakness
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
ROLAND BARTHES

Language Prevent Progression Speech
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
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
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Hard Time Ourselves Suffering
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Certificate Photograph Presence
To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
ROLAND BARTHES

Body Eat Origin Sing Talk
The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Education School
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
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
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 make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
ROLAND BARTHES

Absence Myself Responsibility World
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
ROLAND BARTHES

Confession Inflexion Lying
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
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
ROLAND BARTHES

Existence Oneself Repeat Reproduction
The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
ROLAND BARTHES

Himself Imagination Policy Politics Trouble

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

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He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

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