Roland Barthes Quotes

For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

The fact that perfume is so close to emotion, that's why I really love it. It's such a good connection between people. When you fall in love with somebody, smell is very important. It could be your memory of the person - it's touching. And it's also playful, because sometimes you choose a different perfume every day depending on your mood. I like to help with that. I like to give a little joy to people.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.

To long for love, to have experienced passion's deep pleasure, even once, is to understand the mercilessness of having a human body whose memory rides desire's back unanchored from season to season.

You said, 'I'm going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.' I've hidden these words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one's watching. They haven't faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it's not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

How vast a memory has Love!

... i didn't fall in love of course it's never up to you but she was walking back and forth and i was passing through

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

To cultivate the memory we should confide to it only what we understand and love: the rest is a useless burden; for simply to know by rote is not to know at all.

My memory loves you… it asks about you all the time.

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.

You would think after all the hours I’d spent with Gale– watching him talk and laugh and frown– that I would know all there was to know about his lips. But I hadn’t imagined how warm they would feel pressed against my own. Or how those hands [...] could entrap me… I vaguely remember my fingers, curled tightly closed, resting on his chest.

Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

Falling in love with you in the Summer Garden in the white nights in Leningrad is the moment that propels me through life.

I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.

Last night I'd made love to a woman for the first and last time. It had been amazing and I had a memory that would shape the rest of my life.

Line by line, moment by moment, special times are etched into our memories in the permanent ink of everlasting love in our relationships.

Love is a vulnerable thing. Falling in love is like a great drug.

It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.