"He is no true reader who has not……" — George Steiner
"He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.)"
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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.
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