If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

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

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

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.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

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.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.