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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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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
Short
Arms
Fine
Better
Needs
Long
Gesture
Make
Gestures
Never
Theatre

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Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
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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.
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The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
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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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I encounter millions of bodies in my life of these millions, I may desire some hundreds but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
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The Text is not a definitive object.
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The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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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.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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