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George Steiner Quotes about Silence

All George Steiner Quotes Age Art Criticism Culture Genius Heart Language Literature Past Poetry Reading Risk Silence quotes Writing
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

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

George Steiner
Silence, Borders, World

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

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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