Roland Barthes Quotes

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.

'No comment' is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

Silence is the last thing the world will ever hear from me.

Speech is the small change of silence.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

It's always like you write a poem when you can't really say what you're trying to say.

You can't be silent and create silence in being silent. So you have to create silence or, rather, the effect of silence, through words.

Instead of sounding pretentious, phony, or repetitive, I'd rather not speak.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

When you're alive and everything is going fine, why talk about things? Talking's for later, when talking's all there is that's left.

There were grammatical errors even in his silence.

The absence of words is the absence of intimacy. There are experiences that are starved for language.

Why must one talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean. (Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie)

Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying.

Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

Death is a dramatic accomplishment of absence; language may be almost as effective.