Quoted in 'Venerable Poets :Words to Pop Music beat 'by Cynthia Wolfe Boyton.
“To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.”
Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 4 (pp. 190-191).
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George Steiner 74
American writer 1929–2020Related quotes

"Texts That Speak to Readers Who Hear: Old English Poetry and the Languages of Oral Tradition", in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (1991), p. 155

“A starving child is a frightful sight. A starving vampire, even worse.”
Source: Interview with the Vampire

On her purpose behind her books http://tolucantimes.info/section/inside-this-issue/young-author-makes-her-mark-in-the-world-of-children’s-literature/
Source: Fares, Please! (1915), Everything Upside Down, p. 186
Context: Charles Lamb, in one of his most delightful essays, sets high worth on the observance of All Fools' Day, because it says to a man: "You look wise. Pray correct that error!" Christmas brings the universal message to men: "You look important and great; pray correct that error." It overturns the false standards that have blinded the vision and sets up again in their rightful magnitude those childlike qualities by which we enter the Kingdom.
Christmas turns things inside out. Under the spell of the Christmas story the locked up treasures of kindliness and sympathy come from the inside of the heart, where they are often kept imprisoned, to the outside of actual expression in deed and word. … It is the vision of the Christ-child which enables all men to get at the best treasures of their lives and offer them for use.

“We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it.”

The Poetic Principle (1850)