Roland Barthes quotes
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“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : "The Death of the Author" (1968)
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“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : "A Lover's Discourse (Talking)". Bok by Roland Barthes, 1977.
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“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”
-- Roland Barthes -
“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : "Camera Lucida". Book by Roland Barthes, www.theguardian.com. 1980.
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“The author enters into his own death, writing begins.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (1989). “Bruissement de la Langue”, p.49, Univ of California Press
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“Literature is the question minus the answer.”
-- Roland Barthes -
“The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : "From Work to Text". Book by Roland Barthes. Proposition 4, 1971.
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“How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?”
-- Roland Barthes -
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“Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”
-- Roland Barthes -
“...language is never innocent.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : Roland Barthes (1984). “Writing degree zero ; &, Elements of semiology”, Random House (UK)
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“Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.”
-- Roland Barthes -
“We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.”
-- Roland Barthes -
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“Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”
-- Roland Barthes -
“To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books
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“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
-- Roland Barthes -
“A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : Roland Barthes (1973). “Mythologies”
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“Every exploration is an appropriation.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : Roland Barthes (1997). “The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies”, p.14, Univ of California Press
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“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
-- Roland Barthes -
“What love lays bare in me is energy.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : Roland Barthes (1990). “A lover's discourse: fragments”, Penguin Books
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“Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.”
-- Roland Barthes -
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“We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.”
-- Roland Barthes -
“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 -
“Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.”
-- Roland BarthesSource : Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (1989). “Bruissement de la Langue”, p.13, Univ of California Press
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“The photographic image... is a message without a code.”
-- Roland Barthes -
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“Where you are tender, you speak your plural.”
-- Roland Barthes
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