We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if th… - George Steiner

" "
We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.

George Steiner

Sources available for members. Sign up free to see where this quote comes from

English

Collect this quote

About George Steiner

Francis George Steiner (April 23, 1929 – February 3, 2020) was a French-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator, who wrote extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Francis George Steiner

All quotes from George Steiner Similar Quotes by other Originators

Originators like George Steiner:

Northrop Frye Randall Jarrell Walter Benjamin Umberto Eco Jorge Luis Borges

Additional quotes by George Steiner

Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

The new pornographers 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.

Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche (and many after him).

We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vaca… - George Steiner

About George Steiner

Also Known As

Additional quotes by George Steiner