Barthes Death Quotes & Sayings

There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic. — Roland Barthes

The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see. — N. Scott Momaday

We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. — Roland Barthes

Maman's death: perhaps it is the one thing in my life that I have not responded to neurotically. My grief has not been hysterical, scarcely visible to others (perhaps because the notion of "theatralizing" my mother's death would have been intolerable); and doubtless, more hysterically parading my depression, driving everyone away, ceasing to live socially, I would have been less unhappy. And I see that the non-neurotic is not good, not the right thing at all. — Roland Barthes

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought ... ? — Roland Barthes

Dreamed of maman again. She was telling me - O cruelty! - that I didn't really love her. But I took it calmly, because I was so sure it wasn't true.

The idea that death would be a kind of sleep. But it would be horrible if we had to dream eternally.

(And this morning, her birthday. I always gave her a rose. Bought two at the little market of Mers Sultan and put them on my desk) — Roland Barthes

The author enters into his own death, writing begins. — Roland Barthes

Mourning. At the death of the loved being, acute phase of narcissism: one emerges from sickness, from servitude. Then, gradually, freedom takes on a leaden hue, desolation settles in, narcissism gives way to a sad egoism, an absence of generosity. — Roland Barthes

I dieted all the time in the Sixties, but we had no idea what dieting meant - we thought it meant not eating anything. — Britt Ekland

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. — Roland Barthes

But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true. — Ernest Hemingway,

As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author. — Johnny Rich

As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania. — Roland Barthes

Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred? — Roland Barthes

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure. — Roland Barthes

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. — Roland Barthes

The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn't move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory. From the start, greedy to play a role, scenes take their position in memory: often I feel this, I foresee this, at the very moment when these scenes are forming. - This theater of time is very contrary of the search of lost time; for I remember pathetically, punctually, and not philosophically, discursively: I remember in order to be unhappy/happy - not in order to understand. I do not write, I do not shut myself up in order to write the enormous novel of time recaptured. — Roland Barthes

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death. — Roland Barthes

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering. — Roland Barthes

Our nation is ripe with a multitude of successful people, who have achieved much for themselves with little impact on anyone else — Fela Durotoye

I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two. — Sue Grafton

Today's "issue" had come all the way down from the System level, where some pinhead wanted to tie each campus's funding directly to its graduation rates. — Mark Panek

In terms of image-repertoire, the Photographer (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death. — Roland Barthes

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. — Roland Barthes

Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly. — Johnny Rich

I waver - in the dark - between the observation (but is it entirely accurate?) that I'm unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically, even if such spasms are close together - and the conviction that deep down, in actual fact, I am continually, all the time, unhappy since maman's death. — Roland Barthes

To be engulfed: outburst of annihilation which affects the amorous subject in despair or fulfillment. At its best, when it's fulfillment, it's a kind of disappearance at will. An easeful death. Death liberated from dying. — Roland Barthes