quotes by George Steiner

"Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity"
— George Steiner

"A perceptive French critic has argued that in an age of deepening illiteracy, when even the educated have only a smattering of classical or theological knowledge, erudition is of itself a kind of fantasy, a surrealistic construct."
— George Steiner

"A canon is a guarded catalogue of that speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings. And this will include, if honestly arrived at and declared (even if solely to oneself), all manner of ephemera, trivial, and possibly mendacious matter…No manor woman need justify his personal anthology, his canonic welcomes. Love does not argue its necessities."
— George Steiner (Real Presences)

"All elucidation and criticism of literature, music and the arts must operate within the undecidability of unbounded sign systems. Aesthetic perception knows no Archimedean point outside discourse. The root of all talk is talk . . . . . I have alluded to the insolubility, an insolubility which solicits rather than precludes metaphysical inquiry, of the question as to whether this unboundedness in language entails a preceding, generative infinitude in human "thought" and imaginary representation. We do not know. We cannot, save metaphorically, ask in words of that which may lie before words."
— George Steiner (Real Presences)

"We speak, we dream ourselves free of the organic trap."
— George Steiner