Roland Barthes

“I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.”

“Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.”

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

“But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.”

“I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.”

“The New is not a fashion, it is a value.”

“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!”

“...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.”

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”

“What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”

“The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”

“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, excessive and impoverished.”

“So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper is exhausted, I have no language left at all: the world is not "unreal" (I could then utter it: there are arts of the unreal, among them the greatest arts of all), but disreal: reality has fled from it, is nowhere, so that I no longer have any meaning (any paradigm) available to me; *I do not manage* to define my relations with Coluche, the restaurant, the painter, the Piazza del Popolo. What relation can I have with a system of power if I am neither its slave nor its accomplice nor its witness." —from_A Lover's Discourse: Fragments_”

“Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”

“מכאן, אולי, אמת מידה ליצירותיה של המודרניות: מקור ערכן בשניותן. הכוונה בכך היא שתמיד יש להן שני צדדים.”

“הטקסט שאתה כותב חייב להוכיח לי שהוא חושק בי. ההוכחה הזאת קיימת: היא הכתיבה. וזו הכתיבה: מדע ההתענגויות על השפה, הקמה־סוטרה שלה.”

“מרחב האפשרות שתתקיים דיאלקטיקה של התשוקה, שההתענגות תהיה בלתי צפויה: שלא ייפול הפור מראש, שיתקיים משחק.”

“אם אני קורא בהנאה משפט, סיפור או מילה כלשהם, הרי זה משום שנכתבו מתוך הנאה.”

“אופנה מציגה עצמה כזכות הטבעית של ההווה על פני העבר.”

“לכל אחד יש דרך אחרת של סבל.”