Quotes by Roland Barthes

“You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a cu...”

“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...?”

“We dont forget, but something vacant settles in us.”

“(Loves 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*; whethe...”

“This singular reversal may perhaps proceed from the fact that for us the subject (since Christianity) is the one who suffers: where there is a wound, there is a subject: die Wunde! die Wunde! says ...”

“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 ...”

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”

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

“So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not "unreal" (I cou...”

“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 treati...”

“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 noth...”

“I experience reality as a system of power. Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, Rome on a holiday, everything imposes on me its system of being; everyone is *badly behaved*. Isn't their impolitene...”

“[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 n...”

“The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”

“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

“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.”

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

“...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 no...”

“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: ca...”

“What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered...”