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.

- Paul De Man

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

- Paul De Man

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.

- Paul De Man

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 Man

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

- 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 c…

- Paul De Man

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

- Paul De Man

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and trans…

- Paul De Man

What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism

- Paul De Man