It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
“But there is a third mode of trancendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
“The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations… — George Steiner Copy Share Image
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. — George Steiner Copy Share Image
