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Literature is the question minus the answer.

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
Poetry
Question
Answers
Literature
Art
Minus
Teens
Healing
Answer

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
Roland Barthes
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In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The 'anything whatever' then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
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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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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The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
Roland Barthes
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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
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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
Roland Barthes
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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
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Roland Barthes
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To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
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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One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
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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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.
Roland Barthes
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
Roland Barthes
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The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here the duration of the transmission is insignificant the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
Roland Barthes
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Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.
Roland Barthes
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Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philtre, it is also the leisurely act of drinking.
Roland Barthes
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The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories this is called the Search for Unity.
Roland Barthes
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Roland Barthes