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"Chopsticks"

The Oriental... tends toward the infinitesimal: the cucumber's future is not its accumulation or its thickening, but its division, its tenuous dispersal,
The chopstick, designating what it selects..., introduces into the use of food not an order but a caprice, a certain indolence: in any case, an intelligent and no longer mechanical operation.
In the gesture of chopsticks, further softened by their substance - wood or lacquer - there is something maternal, the same precisely measured care taken in moving a child: a force (in the operative sense of the word), no longer a pulsion.
By chopsticks, food becomes no longer a prey to which one does violence (meat, flesh over which one does battle), but a substance harmoniously transferred; they transform the previously divided substance into bird food and rice into a flow of milk; maternal, they tirelessly perform the gesture which creates the mouthful, leaving to our alimentary manners, armed with pikes and knives, that of predation.

"A Lover's Discourse: Fragments"

Absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a state of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is by vocation, migrant, fugitive. {"The Time Traveller's Wife", Henry's Clare, surely is this sentence's best illustration.}
Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you: to speak this absence is from the start to propose that the subject's place and the other's place cannot permute. It is to say: "I am loved less than I love."
To manipulate absence is to extend this interval, to delay as long as possible the moment which the other might topple sharply from absence into death.

Roland Barthes, 2 essays (Reply)