George Steiner Quotes
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
Quotes to Explore
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In my downtime, you'll mostly find me curled up with a book. I love reading biographies. My favourites are those of Dalai Lama, Osama Bin Laden, and Einstein.
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
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There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
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Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.
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A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.
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To think about "oblivion" is to think about "what art is".
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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
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Almost any biography will have its useful suggestions for making life a success, but none better or more unfailing than the biography of Christ.
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Any good biography has to got to lead you to the work. Many biographers have started out in love with their subjects and ended up hating them.
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Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
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What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks And formless ruin of oblivion.
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One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.
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I read a lot of biographies, and so much is just so boring or so, like, 'Why did you say that?'
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Ultimately, you're left with the people you love and who love you- everything else fades into oblivion.
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The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
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Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
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I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.
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Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.
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We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value - a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.
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From being a writer of plays, it was not that surprising that somebody thought of giving me a job as an actor. After I played one part, others came along.
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Modern Americans - shaped by raucous politics and a rapacious media - like to think of themselves as experts in confronting mistakes.
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Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side.
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I even tried to usher her into this century by explaining that wearing rainbows didn’t automatically mean a person was gay. The Lucky Charms leprechaun was not necessarily a homosexual. The Care Bear with the rainbow on his tummy did not have a life partner. He didn’t even have genitals.
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The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
