Guess quote

Paul de Man [1919-1983] Belgian

Rank: 104
Critic, Philosopher

Paul de Man, born Paul Adolph Michel Deman, was a Belgian-born literary critic and literary theorist. At the time of his death, de Man was one of the most prominent literary critics in the United States—known particularly for his importation of German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American literary studies and critical theory.

Quote	Tags	Rank
Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.		101
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.		102
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.		103
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.		104
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.		105
Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.		106
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.		107
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.		108
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.		109

The script ran 0.01 seconds.