“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”

—Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”

—Roland Barthes

“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.”

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

“Am I in love? — Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other 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.”

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

“I experience alternately two nights; one bad and one good. Most often I am in the very darkness of my desire; I know not what it wants, good itself is an evil to me, everything resounds, I live between blows, my head ringing; I am blinded by attachment to things and emotions. But sometimes too, it is another night; I think quite calmly about the other, as the other is; I suspend any interpretation; I enter into the night of non meaning; desire continues to vibrate (the darkness is transluminous), but there is nothing I want to grasp; this is the Night of non-profit, of subtle, invisible expenditure: I am here, sitting simply and calmly in the dark interior of love. ”

—Roland Barthes. A Lover’s Discourse

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Translation by Richard Howard, 1978

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
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