Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
Paul De ManRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Meaning can often be found in the nuances of language rather than in its literal sense.
This quote by Paul De Man highlights the complexity of language and meaning. It suggests that to truly convey one's thoughts or feelings, one must often describe language itself in a way that acknowledges its indirectness; sometimes, the deeper truths are only expressed through the subtleties and contradictions found in our mode of communication.
Themes
LanguageMeaningCommunicationNuancePhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
During a linguistics lecture on the fluidity of meaning in communication.
More from Paul De Man
All quotes βThe 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.
Paul De ManRead
Similar quotes
It is not man who is the enemy of the human species. It is the irrational; it is the spiritual when it is divorced from the material; from the lesson in one beating heart or one bleeding vein.
Anne RiceRead
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
H. P. LovecraftRead
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
Douglas AdamsRead
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
Theodor AdornoRead
As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.
Yann MartelRead
Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
Abraham Joshua HeschelRead