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Roland Barthes QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " (Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.). "

― Roland Barthes , A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

3 " Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls. When I realize that common discourse takes possession of my other and restores that other to me in the bloodless form of a universal substitute, applied to all the things which are not here, it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language. For me, the other cannot be a referent: you are never anything but you, I do not want the Other to speak of you. "

― Roland Barthes , A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

4 " Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering. "

― Roland Barthes

5 " As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania. "

― Roland Barthes , Mourning Diary

6 " The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself). "

― Roland Barthes , The Pleasure of the Text

7 " 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. "

― Roland Barthes , A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

8 " [Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography. "

― Roland Barthes , Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

9 " For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: 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 Lucida: Reflections on Photography

10 " Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure. "

― Roland Barthes , The Pleasure of the Text

Roland Barthes QUOTES

11 " ...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading. "

― Roland Barthes , The Pleasure of the Text

12 " We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us. "

― Roland Barthes , Mourning Diary

13 " The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance. "

― Roland Barthes , Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

14 " The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. "

― Roland Barthes

15 " Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes. "

― Roland Barthes , The Death of the Author

16 " Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die. "

― Roland Barthes , Writing Degree Zero

17 " Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. "

― Roland Barthes

18 " Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering. "

― Roland Barthes , Mourning Diary

19 " Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable. "

― Roland Barthes , Mourning Diary

20 " In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject. "

― Roland Barthes , Empire of Signs