Roland Barthes

“Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.”

“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 tim...”

“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...?”

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

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

“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...”

“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 f...”

“We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which...”

“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 preci...”

“In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness...”

“I limp along through my mourning.”

“[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,...”

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

“There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.”

“For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.”

“Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.”

“Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.”

“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.”

“The photographic image... is a message without a code.”

“What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”