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Quote by George Steiner

“The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.”

Quote by George Steiner

Book:Grammars of Creation

Work

Grammars of Creation

This book delves into the foundational elements that govern the creation of art, literature, music, and other forms of expression. It examines the commonalities and differences in creative methods and the cognitive processes involved in generating new ideas. more

Author

George Steiner is an esteemed literary critic, born on April 23, 1929. His work spans a wide range of literary fields, including novels, poetry, drama, and philosophy. more

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“The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.”

Source: George Steiner: A Reader

“If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.”

Ifs Men Language Perception Code Fallen Grammar

Book:No Passion Spent

Source: No Passion Spent

“Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.”

Art Values Literature Particular Reflection Criticism Practicals Judgement Inheritance

Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?

Source: Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?

“To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.”

Kind Children Stories Written Emptiness Spells Burial

Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?

Source: Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?

“The age of the book is almost gone.”

Book Age Reading Gone

Author:George Steiner

“The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.”

Humans Majority Gray Immense Biographies Oblivion

Book:In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture

Source: In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture

“Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.”

Book Creation Privilege Baffled

Book:A Long Saturday: Conversations

Source: A Long Saturday: Conversations

“To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.”

Trying Cities Statements Opposing Praxis

Author:George Steiner

“The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand, a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. [] The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery.”

“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.)”