Paul de Man Quotes
- Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could…
- Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say…
- The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which…
- If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.
- Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.
- What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism
- Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
- The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
- Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.
- The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.
- Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.
- Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.