The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner
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George Steiner quotes
Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.
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.
More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.
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.
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs - but a tribute nevertheless.
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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