Paul De Man > Quotes

“Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.”
― Paul De Man

“If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.”
― Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust

“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.”
― Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism

“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.”
― Paul De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism

“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'.”
― Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism

“Literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation, of aesthetic categories.”
― Paul De Man, The Resistance to Theory

“Consciousness ("here" and "now") is not
"false and misleading" because of language; consciousness is language, and
nothing else, because it is false and misleading.”
― Paul De Man, The Resistance to Theory

“...asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers the question: "What's the difference?" Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only ire. "What's the difference" did not ask for difference but means instead "I don't give a damn what the difference is.”
― Paul De Man

“No one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day.”
― Paul De Man

“Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance.”
― Paul De Man, The Resistance to Theory