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"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."
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"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."
"Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape."
"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love."
"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."
"Why people use "Was" I have heard some people to say "I was a smart kid at school - Eminem", but why "Was", was is a word for describing the past... which will mean that has started and ended... so what??? How to get it now? You aren't wise, are you?"
"He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out."
"Words are the fallen ruins of silent majesty."
"Kitai blinked slowly. "Why would you use the same word for these things? That is ridiculous.""We have a lot of words like that," Tavi said. "They can mean more than one thing.""That is stupid," Kitai said. "It is difficult enough to communicate without making it more complicated with words that mean more than one thing."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"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 critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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