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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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"Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"A cliche is everything you've ever heard of."
"When someone uses the phrase 'the prick one', and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word 'metaphorically', you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all."
"Words like eyeglasses blur everything that they do not make clear."
Explore more quotes by Paul de Man
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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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