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I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die.

Jacques Derrida

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Jacques Derrida
Age: 74 †
Born: 1930
Born: July 15
Died: 2004
Died: October 9
Literary Critic
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Jackie Derrida
Jackie Elie Derrida
Jackie Élie Derrida
J. Derrida
Things
Contradict
Compose
Tension
Dies
Live
Real
Make

More quotes by Jacques Derrida

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Who ever said that one was born just once?
Jacques Derrida
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The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die it is impossible to exit this structure it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.
Jacques Derrida
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We are all mediators, translators.
Jacques Derrida
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I love language as I love life itself!
Jacques Derrida
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These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
Jacques Derrida
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Even if we're in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that's what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.
Jacques Derrida
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I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately
Jacques Derrida
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I’m no good for anything except taking the world apart and putting it together again (and I manage the latter less and less frequently).
Jacques Derrida
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The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.
Jacques Derrida
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I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
Jacques Derrida
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I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.
Jacques Derrida
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I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.
Jacques Derrida
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I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.
Jacques Derrida
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The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.
Jacques Derrida
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If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
Jacques Derrida
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I rightly pass for an atheist.
Jacques Derrida
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In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.
Jacques Derrida
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Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.
Jacques Derrida
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The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.
Jacques Derrida
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Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.
Jacques Derrida