Quotes from Roland Barthes

I'm cold, the lover says, let's go back, but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.

photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an 'ineffable' society...

Another kind of joy, more sober because more responsible, is mine today as well: that of entry into a place that we can strictly term outside the bounds of power. For if I may, in turn, interpret the Collège, I shall say that it is, as institutions go, one of History's last stratagems. Honor is usually a diminution of power; here it is a subtraction, power's untouched portion.

La tautologie. Oui, je sais, le mot n'est pas beau. Mais la chose est fort laide aussi.

mieux valent les leurres de la subjectivité que les impostures de l'objectivité.

The measurement of mourning: eighteen months for mourning a father, a mother.

The lover's discourse is usually a smooth envelope which encases the Image, a very gentle glove around the loved being.

In this mythology of seafaring, there is only one means to exorcise the possessive nature of the man on a ship; it is to eliminate the man and to leave the ship on its own. The ship then is no longer a box, a habitat, an object that is owned; it becomes a travelling eye, which comes close to the infinite; it constantly begets departures.

Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it's when we're busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable.

It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.

Here and there, on the trees, some leaves remain. And I often stand deep in thought before them. I contemplate a leaf and attach my hope to it. When the wind plays with the leaf, I tremble in every limb. And if it should fall, alas, my hope falls with it. - Schubert

If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole times I remain with it? I look at it, I scrutinize it, as if I wanted to know more about the thing or the person it represents... I want to outline the loved face by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation; I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth.

A delirium, however, does not exist unless one wakens from it(there are only retrospective deliriums): one day, I realize what has happened to me: I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned. Anyone hearing my intimate language would have had to exclaim, as of a difficult child: But after all, what does he want?

The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven.

Miseries of a birth.

Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short, to depreciate love, I persist, I know, I know, but all the same...

Una parte de mí vela en la desesperación; y simultáneamente otra se agita mentalmente arreglando mis asuntos más futiles. Resiento esto como una enfermedad.

Lo que la Fotografía reproduce al infinito únicamente ha tenido lugar una sola vez: la Fotografía reproduce mecánicamente lo que nunca más podrá repetirse existencialmente.

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. — Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments . (Hill and Wang; Second Printing edition June 1, 1979) Originally published 1977.

The gift is contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched, a third skin unites us.

Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing.

The photographic image is a message without a code.

ETYMOLOGY: "Panic" relates to the god Pan; but we can play on etymologies as on words (as has always been done) and pretend to believe that "panic" comes from the Greek adjective that means "everything.

Ce que cache mon langage, mon corps le dit» Roland Barthes (Fragments d'un discours amoureux)