Quotes from barthes roland ii

The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation.

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

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!

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.

Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates.

Myth is depoliticized speech.

The pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.

Which is what literature is: that I cannot read without pain, without choking on truth.

The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.

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.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions--these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.