It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.
From George Steiner
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
The age of the book is almost gone.
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