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.

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

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

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

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