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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.

— George Steiner Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

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More quotes by George Steiner

Compared to Homeric or even to medieval times, modern man inhabits the physical world like a rapacious stranger.

Marxism and the Literary Critic (1967)

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

The Death of Tragedy (1961)

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.

Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.

Real Presences (1989)

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

Real Presences (1989)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George Steiner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.