Culler, Jonathan D. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.

“For Derrida, writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more (p. 145)” (Culler quoting Rorty 90).

“Philosophers write but they do not think that philosophy ought to be writing. The philosophy they write treats writing as a means of expression which is at best irrelevant to the thought it expresses and at worst a barrier to that thought” (Culler 90).

“The ideal would be to contemplate thought directly” (Culler 91).

“If, for example, meaning is thought of as the product of language rather than its source, how might that affect interpretation?” (Culler 110)

“The play of meaning is the result of what Derrida calls ‘the play of the world,’ in which the general text always provides further connections, correlations, and contexts (L’Escriture et la difference, p. 427/292)” (Culler 134).

“The supplement is an essential extra, added to something complete in itself, but the supplement is added in order to complete, to compensate for a lack in what was supposed to complete in itself” (Culler 103).

“But when I speak, my voice does not seem to be something external that I first hear and then understand. Hearing and understanding my speech as I speak are the same thing” (Culler 107).

“There is such a thing as an original Hemingway style only if it can be cited, imitated, and parodied” (Culler 120).

“Writing can be added to speech only if speech is not a self-sufficient, natural plentitude, only if there is already in speech a lack or absence that enables writing to supplement it” (Culler 103).

“When anyone proposes an example of a meaningless sentence, listeners can usually imagine a context in which it would in fact have meaning; by placing a frame around it, they can make it signify” (Culler 122).

“context is boundless in two senses. First, any given context is open to further description . . . Context is also unmasterable in a second sense: any attempt to codify context can always be grafted only the context it sought to describe, yielding an new context which escapes the previous formulation” (Culler 123-124).