QUOTES by Roland Barthes
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—You have never known a Woman’s body! —I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Around 6 p.m.: the apartment is warm, clean, well-lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Afternoon with Michel, sorting maman’s belongings. Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the [Eiffel] Tower is the only blind point f the total optical system of which it is the center and Paris the circumference.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Now take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight, and cast it entire into a single man - all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
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.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character
Quote by -Roland Barthes
What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers—a kind of sclerosis. [Which means: no depth. Layers of surface—or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
[T]he more technology develops the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Ci� che reclamo � vivere la piena contraddizione del mio tempo, che mai cos� bene ha reso al sarcasmo la condizione della verit�.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
...that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
In the sentence “She’s no longer suffering,” to what, to whom does “she” refer? What does that present tense mean?
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas as I do.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Everyone is “extremely nice”—and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis”).
Quote by -Roland Barthes
I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.
Quote by -Roland Barthes
I live in my suffering and that makes me happy. Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.
Quote by -Roland Barthes