338 Quotes by Roland Barthes

The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel.

Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l’autre. Language is a skin; I rub my language against another language.

Any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.

All of a sudden it didn’t bother me not being modern.

Like love, mourning affects the world – and the worldly – with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.

I can’t get to know you” means “I shall never know what you really think of me.” I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

It is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.

Like a kind of melancholy mirage, the other withdraws into infinity and I wear myself out trying to get there.