Best 14 quotes of Paul De Man on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it. But since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves. What they call anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, is nothing but literature reappearing like the hydra's head in the very spot where it had been suppressed. The human mind will go through amazing feats to avoid facing 'the nothingness of human matters'.