Quotenik
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absence

“A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll have to get used to existing quite naturally within this solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, fastened to the ‘presence of absence.'”

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source: entry dated November 28, 1977, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 69.

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medium: diary

notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.

“For some reason, the idea of absence, of leaving things out, has been very important in my work.”

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source: “No More Boring Art: John Baldessari’s Crusade,” by Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker, October 18, 2010, 42–49.

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medium: magazine profile

“Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.”

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source: Voices: Aphorisms, selected and translated by W. S. Merwin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 22.

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medium: aphorism

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