Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
More Quotes from George Steiner:
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.George Steiner
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 borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.
George Steiner
The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.
George Steiner
Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.
George Steiner
The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner
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Based on Topics: Language Quotes, Reality Quotes, Silence QuotesBased on Keywords: meaningfully, presumably, segment
Men at a distance, who have admired our systems of government unfounded in nature, are apt to accuse the rulers, and say that taxes have been assessed too high and collected too rigidly.
Henry Knox
Being dead is being weak and walled off.
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I never really considered acting as a career until I moved to New York.
Michael C. Hall