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Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

Roland Barthes

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Roland Barthes
Age: 64 †
Born: 1915
Born: November 12
Died: 1980
Died: March 25
Diarist
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Literary Theorist
Mythographer
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Roland Gérard Barthes
Choking
Choke
Literature
Read
Pain
Truth
Without

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
Roland Barthes
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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.
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The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
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All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
Roland Barthes
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Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
Roland Barthes
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Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin I rub my language against another language.
Roland Barthes
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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
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The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
Roland Barthes
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Roland Barthes
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This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.
Roland Barthes
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The Text is not a definitive object.
Roland Barthes
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Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
Roland Barthes
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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
Roland Barthes
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The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
Roland Barthes
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I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.
Roland Barthes
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I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland Barthes
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
Roland Barthes
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Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
Roland Barthes