To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.
George SteinerThe Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.
George SteinerPornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.
George SteinerTo many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
George SteinerThe ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner