Quote of the Day (8/29/09) (Words Week)

In an author's lexicon, will there not always be a word-as-manna, a word whose ardent, complex, ineffable, and somehow sacred signification gives the illusion that by this word one might answer for everything. Such a word is neither eccentric nor central; it is motionless and carried, floating, never pigeonholed, always signifier taking up the place of every signified. This word has gradually appeared in his work; at first it was masked by the instance of Truth (that of history), then by that of Validity (that of systems and structures); now it blossoms, it flourishes. . . .
--Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes