Quotes from 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.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

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 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.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

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.

Literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation, of aesthetic categories.

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.

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