"Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language,……" — George Steiner
"Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien - the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive - tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me."
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George Steiner
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76 Quotes by George Steiner
George Steiner has 76 quotes on this site.
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It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the…
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The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this…
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To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
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The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she…
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The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.
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The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can…
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If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are…
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Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on,…
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To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is…
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The age of the book is almost gone.
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The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
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Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.
See all 76 quotes by George Steiner »
More Accelerando Quotes
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