“Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates,… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness;… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor:… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Valéry used to speak of those people who die in an accident because they are unwilling to let go of their umbrellas; how many… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision. — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.” — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“(Sartre) (The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Like love, mourning affects the world—and the worldly—with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
