Roland Barthes Quotes

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 curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire. interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).

~ 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

(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

…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 Parsifal, thereby becoming “himself”; and the deeper the wound, at the body’s center (at the “heart”), the more the subject becomes a subject: for the subject is intimacy (“The wound…is of a frightful intimacy”). Such is love’s wound: a radical chasm (at the “roots” of being), which cannot be closed, and out of which the subject drains, constituting himself as a subject in this very draining.”―from_A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments_. Translated by Richard Howard, p. 189

~ Roland Barthes

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

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

~ Roland Barthes

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

~ Roland Barthes

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

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

[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

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 curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my d

~ Roland Barthes

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

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

~ Roland Barthes

...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

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

~ Roland Barthes

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 could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me; *I do not manage* to define my relations with Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, the Piazza del Popolo. What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness. —from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_

~ Roland Barthes

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 impoliteness merely a *plenitude*? The world is full, plenitude is its system, and as a final offense this system is presented as a nature with which I must sustain good relations: in order to be normal (exempt from love)...—from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_

~ Roland Barthes

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

~ Roland Barthes

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

~ 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.

~ Roland Barthes

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

~ Roland Barthes

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

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

~ Roland Barthes

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

I transform Work in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real Work - of writing.

~ Roland Barthes

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

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 on my way?

~ Roland Barthes

Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

~ Roland Barthes

...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much'; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is (i)pensive(i), when it thinks.

~ Roland Barthes

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

Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.

~ Roland Barthes

As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.

~ Roland Barthes

Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive.

~ Roland Barthes

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

~ Roland Barthes

If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

~ Roland Barthes

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize that something is wrong with me. I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult...

~ Roland Barthes

I have a disease, I see language.

~ Roland Barthes

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

~ Roland Barthes

Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.

~ Roland Barthes

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.

~ Roland Barthes