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 More Quotes by Roland Barthes More Quotes From Roland Barthes …the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life. Roland Barthes book 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 causesdoewriting Contemporary poetry ... tries to transform the sign back into meaning: Roland Barthes would-becloudstrying 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 unrealityarmsdies For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead. Roland Barthes realtwopast The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Roland Barthes tissuescentreculture 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 answersdoemean 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 realnew-yorkmen To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power. Roland Barthes prerogativeconstantwaiting He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life. Roland Barthes whole-lifewholestories A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony. Roland Barthes photographyintellectualmemories 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 encountersbodydesire 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 stereotypeuniquedesire Every exploration is an appropriation. Roland Barthes appropriationexploration Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse? Roland Barthes eroticglimpsebody But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images. Roland Barthes lensesmirrorseye What love lays bare in me is energy. Roland Barthes laysenergy We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes. Roland Barthes destructionvoicewriting 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 kissingaddneeds Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it's the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell. Roland Barthes climateessencehero
