George Steiner Quotes
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent. The age of the book is almost gone. The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital. The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light. There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness. To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war. We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.
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