The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room.
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About George Steiner
George Steiner was a 20th-century American and american writer, literary critic and philosopher. Francis George Steiner, FBA was a French and American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator. He wrote extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, as well as the impact of the Holocaust. Read more on Wikipedia →