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

--

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

George Steiner

#Reality Quotes #Silence Quotes #Special Quotes

“Putin likes to quote a sentence from Czar Alexander III, who said that Russian has only two allies - the army and the navy. As a citizen, this makes me sit up and take notice. This is a concept of self-imposed isolation, a defense strategy that sees Russia surrounded by enemies.”
“It's not ignorance does so much damage; it's knowin' so derned much that ain't so.”
“Being an author means, almost by definition, that you make up characters and then complicate their lives. That's it, really. You make up characters and give them problem after problem after problem.”
“You have only one life to live, so live it without worrying about what others may think.”
“I can see inside planes!' he yells. 'Come and look!' It's difficult climbing in a mini dress...I haul myself up even though my arms ache. I want to see inside planes too. I want to watch the wind and catch birds in my fist.”
“Everything in the world had happened to them and kept on happening. They didn't care. They liked it that way.”
“Believers are often thought of as people who have some kind of private conviction or repudiation of something, whereas "the faithful" refers to a relationship, which was also incidentally the earlier sense of "faith" in premodern, preliberal Christianity. This is not to say, incidentally, that "faith" refers simply to external behavior as opposed to internal belief but that it refers to an act.”
“A woman today is good, or she is bad, according to the way she does a thing - and not because of the thing itself.”

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