23 Quotes by Paul De Man

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'.

Consciousness ("here" and "now") is not"false and misleading" because of language; consciousness is language, andnothing else, because it is false and misleading.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.