Paul De Man Quotes & Sayings

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament. — Paul De Man

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. — Paul De Man

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 be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure. — Paul De Man

Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified. — Paul De Man

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 what one means. — Paul De Man

What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism — Paul De Man

...asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers the question: "What's the difference?" Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only ire. "What's the difference" did not ask for difference but means instead "I don't give a damn what the difference is. — Paul De Man

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being. — Paul De Man

And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat--that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words. — Paul De Man

No one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day. — Paul De Man

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts. — Paul De Man

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 it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature. — Paul De Man

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions. — Paul De Man

If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing. — Paul De Man

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. — Paul De Man

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements. — Paul De Man

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. — Paul De Man

Consciousness ("here" and "now") is not
"false and misleading" because of language; consciousness is language, and
nothing else, because it is false and misleading. — Paul De Man