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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

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
Obliged
Everywhere
Fail
Failing
Story
Read
Stories
Reread

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
Roland Barthes
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In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
Roland Barthes
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Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
Roland Barthes
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If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
Roland Barthes
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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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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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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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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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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Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.
Roland Barthes
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I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
Roland Barthes
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The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
Roland Barthes
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Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
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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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
Roland Barthes