Sven Birkerts famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Dream #Book #Reading
What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Reading #Destiny #Ideas
If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Book #Reading #Years
The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Book #Matter
Where am I when I am involved in a book?
-- Sven Birkerts

#Book
Language is the soulâ€™s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Ozone #Soul #Layers
Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. â€˜Thereâ€™ was then; â€˜hereâ€™ is now.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Unique #Radiation #Shots
Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor. Reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Spring #Communication #Reading
To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one's essential position [in life].
-- Sven Birkerts

#Blow #Self #Focus
A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Crush #Book #Self
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Believe #Book #Technology
Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Ozone #Soul #Layers
If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Mass Culture #Literature #Retreat
A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.
-- Sven Birkerts

#Space #Light #Language

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