Quotes from Roland Barthes

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.

You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love.

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.

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.

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters.

The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.

If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand.

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?

May cocktails. A sad, depressing sensation of a seasonal and social stereotype. What comes to my mind is that maman is no longer here and life, stupid life, continues.

Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.

The Text is not a definitive object.

The Text is without a source -- the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text.

A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed.

To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.

Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

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.