338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

The lover's discourse is in a sense a series of No Exits

I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign... Everything is solemn: I have no sense of proportions.

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity".

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

Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither *he* nor *she* The other has only a name of his own, and her own name. The third person pronoun is a wicked pronoun; it is a pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls.

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Aucun n'est d'un métal si pur qu'il laisse l'autre sans voix.

La neurosis es un mal menor: no en relación con la "salud" sino en relación con ese "imposible" del que hablaba Bataille ("La neurosis es la miedosa aprehensión de un fondo imposible", etc.); pero ese mal menor es el único que permite escribir (y leer).

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.