George Steiner Quotes About Silence

Quotes about: Silence

• 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.)

  George Steiner

  Book, Night, Men

• Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

  George Steiner

  Reality, Silence, Special

  George Steiner (2010). “Language and Silence”, p.30, Faber & Faber

• Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

  George Steiner

  Silence, Borders, World

• 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

  Broken, Silence, Society

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.432, Oxford University Press on Demand

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