“Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.” — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.” — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up"… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground,… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse)… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“13084 Tonight I came back to the hotel alone; the other has decided to return later on. The anxieties are already here,… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being:… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby… — Roland Barthes Copy Share Image
“Besides intercourse (when the Image-repertoire goes to the devil), there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted,… — 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
“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
